Critical Companion to Dante: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work

C RITICAL C OMPANION TO

Dante A Literary Reference to His Life and Work

JAY RUUD

For Jenny and Chris

Critical Companion to Dante Copyright © 2008 by Jay Ruud All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 ISBN: 978-0-8160-6521-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruud, Jay. Critical companion to Dante / Jay Ruud. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8160-6521-9 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title. PQ4335.R88 2008 851'.1—dc22 2007033473 Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design adapted by James Scotto-Lavino Cover design by Jooyoung An Printed in the United States of America VB Hermitage 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Biography Part II: Works A–Z La commedia (The Divine Comedy) Overview Major Characters in the Commedia Dante the Pilgrim Virgil Beatrice

Inferno Introduction and Upper Hell (Virgil, the Vestibule, the Gate, and Limbo; Cantos 1–4) Sins of Incontinence (the She-Wolf)—(Circles 2–5: Lust, Gluttony, Hoarders and Wasters, Wrathful and Slothful; Cantos 5–7) Walls of Dis and the Heretics (City Walls and Circle 6; Cantos 8–11) Sins of Violence (the Lion)—(Circle 7: Violence against Neighbor, Self, God, Art, and Nature; Cantos 12–17) Simple Fraud (the Leopard)—(Circle 8: Seducers, Panderers, Flatterers, Simoniacs, Diviners, Grafters, Hypocrites, Thieves, Evil Counselors, Sowers of Discord, Falsifiers; Cantos 18–30) Compound Fraud (the Leopard)—(Circle 9: Treachery against Kin, Country, Guests and Hosts, Lords and Benefactors; Cantos 31–34)

Purgatorio Ante-Purgatory (Entrance to Purgatory and the Three Ledges: The Excommunicated, the Late Repentant, and the Negligent Rulers; Cantos 1–9)

v vii 1 19 21 21 23 23 25 26

27 28

35 40 47

58

88

95 97

Lower Purgatory—Love Perverted (The Proud, the Envious, the Wrathful; Cantos 10–17) Middle Purgatory—Love Defective (Terrace 4, the Slothful; Canto 18) Upper Purgatory—Love Misdirected (The Covetous, the Gluttonous, the Lustful; Cantos 19–27) Earthly Paradise and Meeting with Beatrice (Cantos 28–33)

Paradiso Entry to Paradise: Sphere of Fire and Music of the Spheres (Canto 1) Lower Paradise (The Inconstant, the Seekers of Honor, the Amorous; Cantos 2–9) Circles of Souls—the Active and Contemplative Lives (Doctors of the Church, Warriors of God, Just Rulers, the Contemplative; Cantos 10–22) Dante’s Examination: (Spheres of the Fixed Stars and the Primum Mobile; Cantos 23–29) The Empyrean: Mystic Rose and Thrones of the Blessed (Cantos 30–33)

Il convivio (The Banquet) Eclogues Epistles De monarchia (Monarchy) Quaestio de aqua et terra (A Question about Water and Earth) Rime La vita nuova (New Life) De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vernacular)

116 132 134 157

172 174 176

191 222 239

249 281 283 297 309 311 349 362

Part III: Related Entries

371

Part IV: Appendices Chronology of Life and Works Internet Sources on Dante Bibliography of Dante’s Works Bibliography of Secondary Sources

533 535 538 540 542

Index

551

Acknowledgments S

pecial thanks should go to Ali Welky, my graduate assistant, whose work (in particular in editing the Divine Comedy section of the book) was absolutely first-rate. I also want to thank my two other graduate assistants, Stephanie Fritts and Joshua Gillespie, who worked with me for shorter periods but whose help was also quite valuable. I should also thank the Graduate School of the University of Central Arkansas for the funding to hire the three aforementioned graduate assistants. I also want to thank Stacey Jones, who has, as always, been a support and inspiration and whose advice on editing matters also proved very beneficial. I should thank, as well, the staff of the Torreyson Library at the University of Central Arkansas,

particularly for their help in obtaining materials. For their contributions to the “Related Entries” section of the book, the students in my graduate class in research methods also deserve my thanks: Paulette Bane, Briana Barentine, Katie Evans, Jessica Felkins, Robert Giles, Anthony Hafner, Jeanette Holland, Whitney Jones, Paul Lewis, Angela Mahan, Joshua Markham, Don Smith, Amy Stahl, and Mandi Tollett. I want to thank Gerardo Bruno for occasional help with Italian. Finally, I want to acknowledge my gratitude to my literary agent, Jodie Rhodes, and to my editor, Jeff Soloway, and the staff at Facts On File.



INTRODUCTION D

ante Alighieri was born nearly 750 years ago. While he achieved some acclaim among his countrymen in his own lifetime, he died under a death sentence, in exile from his home in Florence, and in relative poverty, relying on the goodwill of Guido Novello da Polenta, the lord of Ravenna, for his livelihood. Today a quick Google search brings up more than a million Web sites that mention Dante. Hundreds of books and articles are published annually concerning his works, his life, and his literary influence. In the past dozen years or so, at least 13 new English translations alone of his most popular work, the Inferno, have seen print. Classic translations by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Singleton, John D. Sinclair, Dorothy Sayers, and John Ciardi have been reissued or are still in print. Three different editions of Mark Musa’s translation are available. Allan Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, Anthony Esolen, Robin Kirkpatrick, Robert Durling, Ciaran Carson, and Robert Hollander all have recent and attractive paperback translations of the Inferno at affordable prices available to every English-speaking reader in the world. Such availability of his work, in so many forms, would have boggled Dante’s mind, living as he did in a time when each individual text produced had to be painstakingly and expensively copied by hand, so that a book might cost the equivalent of the price of a car in today’s world. Indeed, Dante seems at first a very unlikely candidate for such popularity. Writing in a foreign tongue in what many today consider the ancient past, describing a very sectar-

ian and time-bound medieval Christian (Catholic) afterlife, advocating an outmoded Imperial political stance, employing a pre-Columbian view of geography, a pre-Copernican view of astronomy, a precapitalist view of economics, and a pre-Enlightenment Aristotelian and medieval Scholastic view of philosophy and natural science, Dante seems an archaic curiosity at best. But the afterlife, particularly Hell, has always fascinated people, even those who do not believe in it, and Dante’s vivid, sensuous descriptions of the torments of the damned have engrossed readers for centuries. For those with more spiritual yearnings, his description of Paradise gives the impression of a true mystical experience, an ineffable vision of God. And there is no better literary representation of the moral struggles of everyday life than the Purgatorio. Despite the outmoded politics of his imperial vision, Dante’s insistence on the separation of church and state and his righteous anger over corruption in government (whether secular or ecclesiastical) are as timely now as they were in his day. His inflexible insistence on personal responsibility and his refusal to allow the individuals represented in his text to make excuses or avoid accountability for their actions display foundational values that speak to modern audiences more effectively than any contemporary self-proclaimed moralist. But even if Dante’s subject matter were not engaging in itself, the beauty of his poetry stands out even in translation, particularly when the translation is made by an accomplished Englishlanguage poet. The ambiguity of Francesca’s vii

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reference to Paolo, deeply suggestive but leaving so much unsaid, is brilliantly memorable: “This one, who now will never leave my side, Kissed my mouth, trembling. A Galeotto, that book! And so was he who wrote it; that day we read No further.” (Inferno 5, ll. 121–124, Pinsky translation)

The imagery of daily life for the outcast is captured vividly in lines like these from the Paradiso: . . . You are to know the bitter taste Of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know How hard a path it is for one who goes Descending and ascending others’ stairs. (Paradiso 17, ll. 57–60, Mandelbaum translation)

And the power and finality of the lines inscribed on the gates of Hell give every reader pause: Only those elements time cannot wear Were made before me, and beyond time I stand. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. (Inferno 3, ll. 7–9, Ciardi translation)

Lines like these and countless others inspired Boccaccio and Petrarch. They also spoke to Chaucer and Milton, and, after Henry Cary’s popular 1814 English translation of the Comedy, a long line of 19th- and 20th-century writers in English, including Coleridge, Shelley, Ruskin, Eliot, and Joyce and ultimately Beckett and Seamus Heaney. Even if Dante were not fascinating in himself, he would be of interest to English readers through his influence on these English writers and, indeed, on the entire history of Western literature since the Middle Ages. A recent book edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff, The Poets’ Dante, gathers essays and pieces from 28 modern poets—from Pound, Eliot, and Yeats through Auden, Lowell, and Nemerov to Merrill, Heaney, Merwin, and Pinsky—all appreciations of Dante’s art and genius. John Ruskin called Dante “the central man in the world,” while T. S. Eliot is quoted as saying, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.” There are those who would propose that Homer, or perhaps Goethe,

might be considered as third or fourth members of this exclusive group, at least in terms of their influence on Western literature. While Dante has never been accused of humility, even he might be surprised to appear on this very short list, which does not include his own beloved Virgil. But certainly ever since Longfellow enraged the trustees of Harvard University by daring to offer a course in Dante—whose poetry was written in a modern European language rather than in Greek or Latin, the only fit languages for serious study—the English-speaking world has been enchanted by Dante. Dante himself saw the future when he insisted on writing the COMMEDIA in Italian, rather than in a classical language no longer spoken by his fellow Italians. He explains his reasons for this (in Latin) in his DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA, and history has proved him right. Dante speaks in a living language, and he speaks eloquently to living readers. Many students are surprised to learn that Dante was the author of several other works in addition to the Divine Comedy. Aside from De vulgari eloquentia he wrote the VITA NUOVA, which introduces readers to his beloved Beatrice and relates her death; the Convivio, a vernacular “banquet” of knowledge gleaned from Latin and Greek philosophers; DE MONARCHIA, a political text advocating the return of imperial power to a single world ruler to counter the secular power of the pope; several Latin epistles (in this book, covered in the entry EPISTLES), two Latin eclogues (covered in the entry ECLOGUES), a scientific treatise on geography (covered in the entry QUAESTIO DE AQUA ET TERRA), and more than 80 lyric poems (most are covered in the entry RIME, the title of the modern collection of Dante’s lyrics, though some are covered in the entries on IL CONVIVIO and the Vita nuova) through which he developed his poetic style and honed his genius before embarking on the great project of his Commedia. All of these works are summarized and analyzed in this volume. This critical companion makes no attempt to be comprehensive. The MLA International Bibliography lists 1,052 items published on Dante since the year 2000—10,831 since the bibliography began in the early 20th century. No single volume could hope to encapsulate the sheer weight of this cumulated

Introduction    ix knowledge. Instead, this book attempts to fill a gap left by the now-outdated Handbook to Dante Studies of Umberto Cosmos (1950). This book is intended to be an introduction to Dante and his works for students and general readers. Reading the summaries and commentaries on the various sections of the Divine Comedy should be a valuable aid for nonexpert readers of that text. The Related Entries section lists and describes most of the important figures Dante meets in the Comedy, as well as many other people, places, and topics important to the understanding of Dante’s life and work. The book may also serve as a reference for more experienced teachers and scholars in providing handy reviews of details from the various texts, discussions of individual characters in the Comedy or in Dante’s life, and an extensive bibliography of works in English, particularly comprehensive with regard to publications since 2000 and generous in its coverage of significant publications prior to that time.

How to Use This Book Part I is a short biography of Dante that describes his life and situates him in his time. Part II consists of entries on all of Dante’s works in alphabetical order, beginning with the Divine Comedy, which, given its prominence, is accorded a far more detailed synopsis and commentary than Dante’s other works. Part III includes entries on Dante’s contemporaries, writers and thinkers who influenced him, characters (both real and mythological) who appear in the Comedy, places, battles, movements, and other significant related items. Part IV contains appendices, including a chronology of Dante’s life and times, an annotated list of valuable Internet sites devoted to Dante, a bibliography of Dante’s works (focusing on English translations), and a bibliography of secondary sources. To indicate a cross-reference, any name or term that appears as a main entry in Part II or Part III is printed on first appearance in an entry in small capital letters.

PART I

Biography

Biography

3

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) DANTE’S WORLD The world into which Dante Alighieri was born was a turbulent hotbed of violent partisan politics that reflected the power struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor on the international level across Italy and Germany and that spilled over to affect local politics as well. In Italy the major factions were known as the GUELPHs and the GHIBELLINEs, Italianized forms of the names of two rival German factions: the Waiblings, whose name was taken from that of a castle—Waiblingen—the owners of which, the Hohenstaufen family, ultimately produced the Emperors Frederick Barbarossa and FREDERICK II OF SWABIA, and the Welfs, the family that became the greatest political rivals of the Hohenstaufens. Their partisan rivalry, which was essentially the rivalry between pro- and anti-Imperial factions, spread into Italy. In the 16th Canto of his PARADISO, Dante recalls the event that opened FLORENCE to this rivalry: When Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, heir of an ancient and wealthy Florentine family, forsook the daughter of the Amidei family on their wedding day in order to marry instead the daughter of Gualdrada Donati, the Amidei avenged the dishonor by murdering Buondelmonti at the foot of the statue of Mars at the Ponte Vecchio in 1215. Thus began a bitter feud, and the two families sought support from allies outside Florence: the Amidei from Imperial allies, and the Buondelmonti from allies in allegiance with the papacy. As a result of this feud, between 1215 and 1278, the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Dante’s native TUSCANY were involved in a power struggle that included numerous plots, betrayals, strange alliances, and sometimes open warfare. Authority shifted constantly from one party to the other. Each change in power in the chief Tuscan city of Florence brought with it new orders for the expulsion or exile of prominent members of the losing side, so that it was not at all unusual to be what

The Yale Dante, attributed to the school of Angelo Bronzino ca. 1575 but possibly of earlier date, is the finest Dante portrait in the United States. From Dante and His World, by Thomas Caldecot Chubb, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966.

Dante was to become the last 20 years of his life: a Florentine expatriate. In Florence the Ghibelline party was made up largely of the landed feudal nobility, while the Guelph party comprised the city’s artisan class as well as the lesser aristocracy, the group to which Dante’s family belonged. On the national level the Ghibellines were identified generally by their allegiance to the authority of the emperor in secular matters, while the Guelphs as a group generally supported the power of the pope as the chief political rival of the emperor. As time went on, however, these distinctions became blurred and less important, and local concerns like family feuds and private interests tended to dominate partisan agendas. The issues dividing the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Florence later in the 13th century tended (like the Buondelmonti murder) to be matters of specifically Florentine import.

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Critical Companion to Dante

The Florence of Dante’s youth was one of the richest and largest cities in Europe, and a significant intellectual and artistic, as well as commercial, center. It surpassed PISA in population only in about 1250, but between 1250 and 1300 its population grew to 100,000—larger than Paris and twice as large as London. The growth of the city was chiefly due to its commercial class. The city became a major manufacturer of fur, silk, leather, and most important wool: The wool guild alone controlled 250 shops (called botteghe) and employed some 30,000 people. But the wealthiest groups in Florence were the banking families: There were 80 banks in the city, and the florin, Florence’s currency, was the first gold coin minted in western Europe (in 1252). The florin became a standard currency throughout Europe, cementing the international reputation of the city as a commercial center, and banking families like the Bardi and the Peruzzi became extremely rich. Citizens relying on Florence’s commercial interests, like the bankers and the wool merchants, tended to be Guelphs, while the “old money” aristocracy were generally Ghibellines. Eventually the Guelph party prevailed in Florence, and after the decisive Guelph victory in 1266 at the Battle of Benevento over the Ghibelline forces of MANFRED (son of Frederick II), peace was secured in Florence for nearly 30 years. Dante was a year old when that battle occurred. By the late 1290s, however, the Guelph party itself was splitting into two rival factions, which came to be called the NERI (or Black Guelphs) and the BIANCHI (or White Guelphs). The Whites were led by a wealthy merchant family called the Cerchi (led by the wealthy merchant VIERI DE’ CERCHI) and were generally made up of merchant interests whose chief political goal was peace, since war disrupted trade. The Blacks, on the other hand, fomented Florentine Imperialist interests. They were led by the Donati, a family of old money and with extensive banking interests throughout Europe (Dante’s wife, GEMMA DONATI, was a member of this family). POPE BONIFACE VIII, who received a good deal of financial support from Florentine bankers, openly supported the Black party and through that alliance hoped to gain control over all of Tuscany.

Since their opposition to the Black party ultimately brought the Whites into opposition with the secular interests of the pope, the Whites eventually became allied with the old Ghibelline party. It is within this political context that Dante’s biography must be considered.

FAMILY Perhaps it is best to begin a biography of Dante where he would have preferred: with his greatgreat-grandfather CACCIAGUIDA, to whom Dante looked with pride as the noble founder of his line. Cacciaguida appears among the “warriors of God” in Canto 15 of the Paradiso, because of his role in the Second Crusade: A native Florentine descended from a noble Roman family (the Eliseo), Cacciaguida had accompanied the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III during that disastrous crusade and was knighted by the emperor before dying in battle in the Holy Land at the age of 42. Cacciaguida had married a woman from Ferrara of the Alighieri family, and, as was customary, the couple named their younger son Alighiero, after the mother’s father. Alighiero I, as he was later called, married the daughter of the respected Florentine Bellincione Berti in about 1170. Alighiero’s own younger son was named Bellincione, as custom dictated. The younger Bellincione was active in the Florentine city government in the 1250s. His own younger son, ALIGHIERO DI BELLINCIONE D’ ALIGHIERO (ALIGHIERO II), was Dante’s father. Alighiero II made his living by renting property in the countryside outside Florence and by lending money. He was married to BELLA (GABRIELLA DEGLI ABATI), who was from a family of very wealthy landowners with strong Ghibelline sympathies. Their eldest son was born near the end of May 1265 and was initially called Durante (enduring) after his mother’s father, Durante degli Abati. By the time the child was baptized in March 1266 in Florence’s 11th-century Baptistry of San Giovanni (named for SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST, patron saint of the commune of Florence), his parents chose to christen him Dante, a shortened form of the name. Our evidence for his birthday is from the poet’s own testimony, in Canto 22 of the Paradiso (ll. 112–123), where he addresses the sign of Gemini as

Biography if it were his muse, suggesting that all of his literary and intellectual attributes have their source in the influence of the constellation of his nativity. That same year, 1266, saw the crushing defeat of the Ghibelline army led by Manfred (the illegitimate son of the Emperor Frederick II) by a Guelph army under Pope Clement IV’s chosen champion, CHARLES OF ANJOU. That defeat essentially quashed Ghibelline influence in Florence for generations. The Guelphs themselves, however, were ultimately to split into two rival factions whose enmity was as bitter as the Guelph-Ghibelline opposition had been. Dante’s own Ghibelline mother, Bella, died in 1272, leaving motherless her seven-year-old son and his younger sister. But Alighiero II was soon remarried, to a woman named Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi, and with her fathered a second son, Francesco, and two more daughters. Dante was to remain close to Francesco throughout his life. The city of Florence was divided into six sections called sestiere (sixths), and the Alighieri family lived in the sestiere called San Piero Maggione, a section that was to become notorious as the sesto degli scandali (the scandalous sixth) because it was in this section that the bitter internecine struggle between Black and White Guelphs was to erupt. But that time had not yet come.

LOVE AND EDUCATION On May Day, 1274, the Alighieris’ neighbor FOLCO PORTINARI hosted a party to celebrate the coming of spring and invited Alighiero II with his young son Dante, not quite nine years old. At the party Dante was to experience one of the transforming moments of his life: It was here that he first laid eyes on Folco’s young daughter Bice. She was the eldest of Folco’s five daughters (he had five sons as well) and for Dante was to become the epitome of charm, grace, and beauty, his “Beatrice” (bringer of blessings). Dante was later to write that after that moment, he sought Beatrice out as often as he could, looking for her in the streets of San Piero Maggione and even following her to church. Beatrice’s mother was Cilia de’ Caponsucchi, whose family owned large estates bordering the Alighieris’ in Pagnolle. With her, Beatrice daily

5

attended church, where Dante often watched her. But Beatrice seems to have been particularly close to her father; Dante speaks of her heartfelt sorrow upon his death. Indeed, Portinari was by all accounts an admirable man, a model citizen who served for two years in the municipal government and who built, on his own family property outside the walls of the city, a hospital for the poor that was named Santa Maria Nuova when it opened in 1288. Unfortunately Portinari did not live long afterward, dying in 1289. Dante’s own father had died in the early 1280s, leaving the teenage Dante to care for his entire family. He seems to have begun by selling off letters of credit that his father held on unpaid loans, thus providing him and his family with ready cash. Nor had Alighiero died without providing for his son’s future in other ways: On February 9, 1277, the 11-year-old Dante was betrothed to 10-year-old Gemma Donati, the daughter of the Alighieri family’s next-door neighbor, Manetto Donati. Manetto was quite wealthy and owned a good deal of land, including an estate that adjoined the Alighieris’ land in Pagnolle. Manetto was rich enough to provide Gemma a dowry twice as large as was conventional for 13th-century Florence, and that clearly was Alighiero’s motive in betrothing his son to Manetto’s daughter. Nor would Dante have expected anything different. There was never any question of his marrying Beatrice, the girl he admired from afar. He would have known that he and Beatrice would marry spouses chosen by their parents, whose concerns were for an alliance that would help ensure economic security for the family. We have no way of knowing what Dante thought about Gemma, or vice versa. Nowhere in any of his extant writings does he ever mention the existence of his wife. Eight years after the betrothal, Dante followed his father’s wishes and went through the religious ceremony that solemnized their marriage, and Dante and Gemma set up housekeeping together. In 1287 their first child, Giovanni, was born. The young Dante did not lack for father figures after Alighiero’s death. In the early 1280s he made his first acquaintance with the popular and influential GUIDO CAVALCANTI, the most important young

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Critical Companion to Dante

poet of Florence. Ten years Dante’s senior, Guido recognized the younger man’s talent and became his mentor and “first friend,” as Dante calls him in the VITA NUOVA. Dante had already begun dabbling in lyric poetry, and he and Cavalcanti belonged to a group called the Fedeli d’Amore (devotees of the god of love), a circle of poets who met periodically in and around Florence to discuss love poetry and to read their poems aloud. The group at various times included LAPO GIANNI and CINO DA PISTOIA. This society, under the leadership of Cavalcanti and eventually of Dante, was beginning to forge a new movement in Italian poetry that was to become known as the DOLCE STIL NOVO (the sweet new style), a faction opposed to the Tuscan love poetry then in vogue, as practiced by GUITTONE D’AREZZO and his followers: Guittone’s poetry was characterized by rhetorical ornamentation and complexity, while the stilnovist ideal, extolling the more direct poetry of GUIDO GUINIZELLI as its model, promoted rhetorical simplicity but employed complex imagery derived from learned sciences like medicine and psychology. It was in this environment that we need to place Dante’s account in his Vita nuova of how Beatrice first spoke with him. Dante claims that, once again on the first day of May, he encountered Beatrice on the street in Florence, flanked by two older ladies. On this occasion Beatrice first spoke with the poet, and Dante goes on to describe a dream he had that night in which the god of love, holding Beatrice in his arms, fed her Dante’s heart. Immediately Dante wrote a SONNET describing the dream and circulated it among the poets of the Fedeli d’Amore, asking for their responses. This initial poem was followed immediately by a number of others expressing his love for Beatrice. If we can believe the details of the Vita nuova, Dante was at the same time engaged in the pretense of addressing love poems to one of Beatrice’s companions as well, disguising his love for Beatrice by pretending to be in love with another woman. In addition to the influence of Cavalcanti, that of his teacher and mentor BRUNETTO LATINI gave Dante another important father figure. Certainly a significant aspect of Dante’s youth would have been his education. Part of this was spent in a

formal school setting, very probably at one of the lower schools operated by the Franciscan order in Florence. Dante may also have attended one of the Franciscans’ more advanced schools of philosophy. At other times the young Dante seems to have had a private tutor. He would have studied the kinds of texts most boys of his time and station read: The basic text would have been a Latin grammar, probably in the standard introduction by the sixthcentury scholar Priscian. This would have been supplemented by the Fables of Aesop and by moral treatises intended to build his character. But later, in the early 1280s, Dante came under the influence of the accomplished scholar Latini. Latini was a writer and scholar who was one of the most significant political figures in Florentine politics from 1266 until he died in 1294 and as such was a role model for the aspiring poet concerned with the political life of his city. Certainly Dante admired Brunetto and held him in high esteem, though in his Comedy he places his old schoolmaster in the seventh circle of Hell, among the sodomites. It has never been completely clear why Dante presents this fate for Brunetto, who is known to have been married and to have fathered several children. In the Comedy his relationship to Dante is clear, however, as Brunetto addresses the pilgrim Dante as “my son.” Brunetto was best known for his allegorical poem Tesoretto, which gives an incomplete account of a narrator’s journey into the next world in search of redemption, an apparent inspiration for Dante’s own great poem. Brunetto had also translated ARISTOTLE’s Ethics and MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO’s De inventione, and it was certainly under Brunetto’s influence that Dante read the authors who were to become most important in his intellectual development: Virgil, BOETHIUS, and Cicero. Brunetto clearly encouraged the young Dante’s zeal for learning, and it is possible that Dante traveled to Bologna around 1287 in order to study rhetoric at the prestigious university in that city. There is no question that, in addition to his infatuation with Beatrice, his poetic apprenticeship under Cavalcanti, and his tutelage under Latini, Dante spent much of the decade of the 1280s learning and exercising the military skills that would

Biography have been expected of him because of his aristocratic ancestry. In that capacity Dante may have been part of a Florentine cavalry troop sent to assist the city’s Sienese allies in putting down a Ghibelline uprising in the city of AREZZO in November 1285. He definitely took part in a later clash with the Aretines, the BATTLE OF CAMPALDINO in the Casentino Valley, on June 11, 1289. The hero of that battle was Dante’s wife’s kinsman CORSO DONATI, who led a reserve rear guard of cavalry into battle against orders and routed the attacking Aretines. Ultimately the Florentines killed 1,700 of the enemy and captured an additional 3,000. Later that same month Dante rode again with a smaller contingent of cavalry to lay siege to the castle fortress of Caprona near Pisa. The Guelph nobleman NINO (UGOLINO) VISCONTI had been driven from that fortress earlier in the decade by his uncle, Count UGOLINO DELLA GHERARDESCA and the treacherous Ghibelline Archbishop RUGGIERI DEGLI UBALDINI DELLA PILA, whose grim story of treason and personal betrayal is related in Canto 33 of Dante’s Inferno. Nino, who had sought refuge in Florence after his defeat and become a friend of Dante’s, was restored to his fortress when the castle surrendered after a 10-day siege. In the meantime Dante’s infatuation with Beatrice was consuming his private life in Florence. The 21-year-old Beatrice married SIMONE DE’ BARDI, whose family were wealthy Florentine bankers, some time late in 1287. She was Bardi’s second wife and took with her a substantial dowry of 600 lire in gold florins. She moved in with her husband’s family in Oltrano—that part of Florence on the far side of the ARNO River—and out of Dante’s immediate neighborhood, thus severely curtailing his opportunities to see her. Dante could not have been surprised by the marriage, but in the Vita nuova he describes his devastation when, upon chancing upon Beatrice in the street, she failed to return his greeting. The perceived snub may have been simply due to Beatrice’s acting modestly, as became a newlywed wife. But Dante saw it as punishment for his attentions to another woman (a second “screen” lady to whom he had been paying attention, again, to allay suspicions of his love for Beatrice). Dante

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tells of at least three “confessional” sonnets that he addressed to Beatrice concerning his love for her, but when the lady received them indifferently, he determined to address no more poems directly to her. Instead he would write poems more objectively praising her excellence. With this aim he wrote what is often considered his first real masterpiece in the lyric form, the 70-line CANZONE (or love poem) “Donne, ch’avette intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies who have intelligence of love”), included in Chapter 19 of the Vita nuova. In this lyric addressed to a group of ladies rather than to Beatrice herself, Dante declares that Heaven itself lacks perfection because it lacks Beatrice. In Canto 24 of his Purgatorio Dante was to portray the older poet ORBICCIANI DA LUCCA BONAGIUNTA, recognizing this particular poem as the epitome of the “sweet new style” of the stilnovisti. Clearly Dante saw this poem as a turning point in his poetic development, and just as clearly he saw Guinizelli as his inspiration, as two cantos later in the Purgatorio, he meets the earlier Tuscan poet and addresses him reverentially as “my father.” As the decade of the 1280s drew to a close, Beatrice’s father, Folco Portinari, died on December 31, 1289. Dante composed two sonnets of consolation for the grief-stricken Beatrice and then fell ill himself for some time. He records in the Vita nuova how, during his illness, he dreamed of his own death and of Beatrice’s as well, which in his dream was followed by the end of the world itself. Ultimately, though, he experienced a vision of Beatrice in peace and in glory in Heaven. Dante subsequently described this illness and its accompanying visions in the 84-line “canzone Donna pietosa e di novella etate” (“A Lady of tender years, compassionate”).

NEW LIFE Perhaps that vision prepared Dante somewhat for what happened next. In June 1290, at the tender age of 24, Beatrice herself passed away. This event seems to have been the major turning point in Dante’s personal life. His emotional focal point, and his poetic inspiration, Beatrice had been the center of his life for some 15 years. After some time of despair and mourning, and a brief space wherein

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Critical Companion to Dante

he apparently tried to forget his sorrows with a new object of infatuation (a woman who had looked at the mourning Dante compassionately from her window), Dante began what must have been the formal composition of a book that helped him gain an emotional and intellectual acceptance of Beatrice’s passing. Begun probably in 1293, the small book called Vita nuova (New Life) is a narration of Dante’s relationship with Beatrice, from the time of their first meeting at Portinari’s party on May Day, 1274, through Beatrice’s death and its aftermath in the poet’s life. The narrative is chiefly a context for Dante’s lyric poems: 26 sonnets, four canzone, and a ballad. After the final poem in Chapter 41—a famous sonnet beginning “Oltre la spera che più larga gira” (“Beyond the sphere that makes the widest round”)—in which the poet’s sigh ascends to Heaven and returns to speak the name Beatrice to him, Dante ends the Vita nuova vowing to write no more of Beatrice until he is able to write of her in a “nobler way” and resolves “to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman” (Musa 86). We hear no more of her from Dante until he makes Beatrice the heroine of his great Commedia.

In the aftermath of Beatrice’s death Dante sought to assuage his grief through the reading of philosophy. In particular, he read ANICIUS MANLIUS SEVERINUS BOETHIUS’s sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy, a short treatise dealing with the problem of innocent suffering in the universe of a benevolent deity. Boethius had written his Consolation in alternating passages of verse and prose—a structure that no doubt influenced Dante’s own Vita nuova, which appeared five years after the death of Beatrice. In addition Dante found particular consolation in Cicero, particularly his advice on dealing with the death of a loved one in De amicitia. He ultimately spent some time investigating contemporary theologians. At the Florentine Dominican center of Santa Maria Novella he studied SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS’s Summa theologica, the masterwork in which Saint Thomas, who had died in 1274, sought to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. Later with the Franciscans of Santa Croce Dante immersed himself in the visionary texts of SAINT BONAVENTURE. Bonaventure, who had also died in 1274, adhered more closely to SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO than to Aristotle in his theology but also wrote mystical tracts. These two great medieval sages—the rationalist and the mystic—were to provide Dante with the intellectual support and vision behind the grand scheme of his Comedy.

POLITICS AND EXILE

The Naples bust (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples) is attributed by some to Donatello, but more generally to “an unknown sculptor of the fifteenth century.” From Dante and His World, by Thomas Caldecot Chubb, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966.

Beyond his inner grief over Beatrice and his contemplative pursuits of philosophy, Dante remained an active participant in civic and family life. By the mid-1290s he was head of a Florentine household that included his sister (whose name is unknown); his half brother, Francesco; and his half sister, Gaetana (or Tana), in addition to his wife, Gemma, and their four children: Giovanni, Pietro, Iacopo, and Antonia. The family was supported by income from farmland in Pagnolle and in Camerata, as well as from city property in the parish of San Antonio. It was Francesco who seems to have handled most of the family’s day-to-day business, though occasionally household expenditures exceeded the Alighieris’ income, and Dante was forced to take

Biography out a considerable loan in 1297, followed by two more loans over the next few years. Meanwhile Florentine politics were heating up significantly, spurred on largely by family and class rivalries. In 1293 Florence adopted a body of laws known as the Ordinances of Justice, advocated by GIANO DELLA BELLA. These ordinances were aimed at reducing the power and influence of the nobility and families of traditional ancient wealth. Such persons were barred from holding public office in Florence and were to be prevented from harassing common citizens. Under these laws some 70 magnates were exiled from the city over a two-year period, until as a result of a conspiracy of wealthy Florentines, Giano was charged with treason in 1295 and forced to flee the city. At the heart of the conspiracy were Dante’s wife’s cousin Corso Donati and the newly elected POPE BONIFACE VIII. At the same time the Donati family became embroiled in a violent feud with a neighboring family, the Cerchi. Motivated essentially by class jealousy—the Donati were a family of old money and ancient privilege, while the Cerchi were something of an upstart merchant family of new money—the feud was apparently sparked by the Cerchi’s decision to renovate their Florentine palazzo in a way that would eclipse the Donati’s own nearby estate. The controversy led to street fights and verbal attacks—Corso Donati engaged in public insults of the Cerchi, calling them pigs and asses. Soon the whole of Florence was drawn into the controversy, with Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti vocally supporting the Cerchi. The whole situation would seem ludicrous and petty had it not ultimately provoked such violence. The Donati attempted to kill Cavalcanti, and he responded by attacking Corso Donati on the streets of Florence with a group of armed men in an assassination attempt that was equally unsuccessful. By enrolling as a member of the Apothecaries’ Guild sometime in 1295, Dante entered the political life of Florence and plunged into this cauldron of civic turmoil. Certainly Dante was not a pharmacist, but he had studied natural philosophy, and the apothecaries tended to welcome intellectuals among their ranks. In addition apothecaries sold books in their shops, so a man of letters was not

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completely out of place. But although Dante’s friend Cavalcanti and his kinsman Corso Donati were embroiled in the municipal strife of the time, Dante’s motives for entering the fray were idealistic rather than partisan. Certainly he had before him the example of Brunetto Latini, the intellectual statesman, to emulate. But the more immediate impetus for Dante’s plunge into politics was probably the Florentine visit of CHARLES MARTEL d’Anjou, the French prince and titular king of Hungary, in March 1294. Charles arrived in Florence on March 5 along with 200 armed knights, to consult his father, King Charles II of Naples. The young Charles was warmly welcomed in Florence and treated to a cultural festival presented in his honor. He enjoyed a number of musical and poetic performances and apparently was particularly impressed by the performance of Dante’s canzone, “Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You who through intelligence move the third sphere”). It was a difficult poem with learned allusions in the Dolce stil novo style, and Charles’s sophisticated appreciation of the poem apparently impressed Dante a great deal. In conversations with the young king Dante seems to have become convinced that Charles was the kind of leader who might unite the Holy Roman Empire and pacify the Italian city states. It was a political ideal that Dante was to cling to throughout all his subsequent bitter years of exile, even though Charles himself died in Naples at the age of 24 barely a year later, on August 12, 1295. Much later in his Paradiso (Canto 8) Dante portrays Charles sympathetically in the sphere of Venus (the Heaven of lovers): Here Charles approaches the poet singing the first lines of the canzone, “Voi ch ‘ntendendo,” through which Dante had first become known to him. In 1295 the government of Florence was a middle-class republic administered by three priors who served two-month terms and were representatives of the city’s major guilds. During their brief tenure the priors were housed in the Tower of the Castagna in Dante’s neighborhood. Below the priors were a number of councils (or consigli) made up of anywhere from 36 to 300 members. The councils debated policy, made recommendations, and proposed legislation. The most important of these, the

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Critical Companion to Dante

The Riccardiana Dante (Riccardiana Library, Florence), an illustration of a manuscript collection of Dante’s poems, is clearly modeled after the Naples bust, and has itself been the model for subsequent painters, including Raphael. From Dante and His World, by Thomas Caldecot Chubb, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966.

Common Council, was presided over by a podestà— a foreign administrator who served a limited term as chief magistrate of the city. The large number of participants and the restricted term limits for government officials meant that in any given year in Florence, some 2,000 positions opened up on the various city councils. Dante first appears in the public record addressing a meeting of the Special Council of the Twelve Major Guilds on December 14, 1295. There is evidence that he was a member of the People’s Council of the Commune of Florence and that he also served on the council for the election of priors for the commune, both in 1295. In 1296 he was a member of the Council of the Hundred (the group in charge

of finance and similar important issues for the city). He gained a reputation as a persuasive speaker and ultimately, in June 1300, was elected one of seven priors for June 15–August 15. Florence in the late spring of 1300 was a political powder keg. On May Day a municipal dance had turned into a bloody riot when a group of Donati and a group of Cerchi met on the street, and the 16year-old Ricoberino de’ Cerchi had his nose cut off in the fight. At the Feast of San Giovanni on June 24, a procession of guild leaders was verbally assaulted by the Donati and their allies, demanding the honors due them as magnates of the city. By now the two factions were divided along class lines, with the Cerchi and their allies known as the Bianchi (Whites) and the Donati and their allies known as the Neri (Blacks). As prior, Dante stepped into a situation in which he was forced to make a hard choice. Though personally sympathetic with the White faction, Dante was persuaded, for the good of the city, to punish both sides in order to restore peace to the city. Thus a number of White leaders were exiled, including Guido Cavalcanti, as well as a number of Black leaders, chief among them Dante’s own kinsman Corso Donati. Corso fled to Rome, where he began lining up allies for his return. Cavalcanti accepted the priors’ banishment to Sarzana in western Tuscany but contracted malaria there. He was permitted to return to Florence in his illness but died before the end of the year. Dante’s performance as prior made him a respected and influential leader in Florentine politics, and he continued to speak often at councils. He traveled to Rome on a diplomatic mission for the city during Boniface VIII’s proclaimed jubilee year of 1300. He was also made superintendent of roads and road repairs for the city in April 1301. But his position was soon to change, mainly through the machinations of Pope Boniface himself. There was little question that Boniface favored the Black party of Florence and sympathized with the displaced nobility of the city. He had sent Cardinal Matthew of Acquasparta to Florence, ostensibly to make peace between the feuding factions of Black and White, but the cardinal so clearly favored the Blacks that he lost all credibility with the White faction, who even attempted to assassinate him and

Biography ultimately drove him from the city. Nevertheless, it was Cardinal Matthew who, in June 1301, took to Florence a papal request for military support to help Boniface acquire large tracts of land south of Siena belonging to the Aldobrandeschi family. The sordid background of this request was well known. Boniface had first attempted to obtain these lands by arranging a marriage between his nephew, Goffredo Caetani, and Margherita degli Aldobrandeschi, who had title to the territories. But Margherita, known as the “Red Countess,” was a woman with a past. Having been married twice before, she was engaged in a notorious affair with Nello dei Pannocchieschi. Meanwhile Nello, in order to be with her, had murdered his own wife, PIA DE’ TOLOMEI (a woman Dante later places among the late repentant in his PURGATORIO). In the wake of this scandal Boniface moved to divorce his nephew from the Red Countess but was reluctant to give up his claim to her lands. Therefore he asked Florence to provide him with 200 armed soldiers to secure the area for his own use. When the request was presented before the council of Florence on June 9, Dante spoke up at the meeting and urged the city not to grant the pope’s request. When the question came to a vote 10 days later, the council agreed to provide the support, but Dante’s opposition to the request was well known (his is the only recorded opposition) and was not the sort of thing that Boniface would easily forget. In the meantime the pope seems to have had other plans for Florence. In May 1301 Boniface called CHARLES OF VALOIS into Italy, in part to reestablish the French presence in Sicily (though Charles had renounced his claim to that throne in 1290), but chiefly to persuade Florence, through his military presence, to accept Boniface’s proBlack position. To that end Boniface named him “peacemaker” of Tuscany. In September Charles met in Siena with the exiled Corso Donati, and later that month Dante spoke out in the full city council, urging his fellow citizens to reject any compromise with Charles. When in October Charles entered Castel della Pieve (halfway between Rome and Florence), he joined forces with many of the Donati and other exiled Blacks, and the Florentine

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government decided to send a diplomatic mission to appeal directly to the pope. Chosen for this task were three ambassadors: Corazzo Ubaldini, Maso Minerberti, and Dante. Boniface listened to the Florentine delegation, then sent Corazzo and Maso back to Florence, detaining Dante in Rome. Meanwhile in Dante’s absence Charles of Valois entered Florence in November with 2,000 troops, effectively establishing martial law in the city. The sitting priors were deposed, and a new election on November 8 put all Black priors into power. Further, the exiled Donati supporter Cante de’ Gabrielli di Gubbio was called back to the city to act as podestà, a position he used to take revenge on the Whites as he saw fit. Worst of all, Corso Donati was recalled from exile and immediately led a mob of Black rioters on a looting and burning spree through the San Piero Maggiore section of the city, destroying the Alighieri home, among other buildings. When Cardinal Matthew attempted to curb the violence and pacify the vengeful Black faction, he was chased out of Florence. By April 1302 all the leading Whites had fled the city. By that time Dante and three other prominent Whites had been charged by the new priors with corruption and financial malfeasance in public office. Although there was no real evidence against him, Dante was accused of graft and of taking bribes, both as prior and as commissioner of roads. Finally released from Rome and allowed to return home, Dante heard of these charges while staying in Siena. With prescient caution Dante chose not to return to the city to answer the trumped-up charges, and on March 10 the priors of Florence issued a death sentence on Dante for failing to answer the allegations. If he returned to his native city, Dante was to be burned to death. For Dante it was in effect a sentence of perpetual exile. He never again set foot in the city of his birth.

THE POET IN EXILE Dante’s first years in exile were spent chiefly in and around Tuscany, seeking some means of returning to Florence. In June 1302 he joined 16 other White Guelph exiles in an alliance with the Ghibelline Ulbaldini family of San Godenzo in a plot to invade

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Critical Companion to Dante

Florence. The Blacks of the city, informed of the plot, sent a military force against the exiles but were repulsed. Despite this, nothing ever came of the plan, and Dante lost patience with the alliance and moved to the city of Forlì, northeast of Tuscany, where he procured the services of the city’s ruler, the Ghibelline Scarpetta Ordelaffi. In March 1303 Ordelaffi sent a force that was defeated by Fulcieri da Càlboli, the brutal Florentine podestà. Ordelaffi also employed Dante as a military and political adviser, but the arrangement did not last long, and within six months Dante had left Forlì for VERONA. By this time the political map of Italy had been changed significantly by the death of Boniface VIII in October 1303. After excommunicating the French king, PHILIP IV THE FAIR, over a dispute about taxes, Boniface had been surprised in his palace at Anagni by Philip’s henchmen. They sacked the palace and manhandled Boniface, who never recovered from the shock of the attack, dying a month later in Rome. Setting aside his personal hatred of Boniface, Dante severely condemned the attack on the office of the pope, in Purgatorio 20, calling the act essentially an attack on Christ himself. But the death of Boniface and the ascension of Benedict XI suggested, to the exiled White Guelphs of Florence, an opportunity to change matters in the city. Dante was sent to Verona as an emissary to Bartolomeo della Scala, to request his support for another attempted invasion of Florence. While this request proved unsuccessful, Dante became fast friends with Bartolomeo and stayed in Verona some nine months. In the meantime in June 1304 Pope Benedict had sent to Florence a papal legate, the Dominican Cardinal Niccolo of Prato, to negotiate a peaceful settlement between the Black and White Guelphs. When the Blacks refused to cooperate, Cardinal Niccolo placed the city under interdict. But Pope Benedict died in July, and with the election of POPE CLEMENT V, the papacy was under French domination for most of the 14th century. In the meantime Florentine exiles were amassing an army for a new assault on the city. Having assembled a force of 1,500 cavalry and 9,000 infantry, the exiles launched an attack in the summer but were soundly defeated at Lastra in July 1304.

In Verona Bartolomeo della Scala had also died in March 1304, and Dante’s relationship with Bartolomeo’s brother and heir Alboino was strained. After quarreling, as well, with the White Guelph exiles over his inability to gain support for their invasion plans, Dante cut his ties with them as well, calling them stupid, wicked, impious, and ungrateful. From that moment he washed his hands of conventional Florentine politics. He sojourned briefly in Padua after 1304, and then in Bologna (where he may have spent time as a student in 1287). Here he was able to renew his friendship with the exiled Black Guelph poet Cino da Pistoia. Cino, one of the members of the Florentine Fedeli d’Amore of Dante’s younger days, exchanged a number of personal sonnets with Dante during this period. In 1306 Cino was allowed to return to Pistoia, but by then Dante had also left Bologna for the ancient Tuscan town of Lunigiana, where he was acting as an adviser and negotiator for the marchese MOROELLO MALASPINA in a dispute with the bishop of Luni. Cino sent a sonnet to Dante in Lunigiana in 1305, and Dante’s last sonnet to Cino was sent from the city of Lucca, just west of Florence. In it Dante makes reference to his decision to take a “different course” in his literary career. In all likelihood he was referring to his new project, either the philosophical CONVIVIO or the Latin treatise DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA. This text was unlike anything in European letters up to that time. In it Dante attempted to justify the use of the vernacular language in the composition of serious literary works. Identifying 14 dialects of the Italian language, he focuses on his own Tuscan variety. He extols the lyric CANZONE (a long stanzaic song) as the highest form of poetry, best able to express the sublime themes of war, virtue, and love. He then praises the troubadours BERTRAN DE BORN (as the premier author of war poetry) and ARNAUT DANIEL (ARNAUD) (as the greatest love poet). Cino da Pistoia is commended for his Tuscan poems on love and virtue. De vulgari eloquentia is an ambitious project that Dante never finished. The text, probably written between 1305 and 1306, breaks off abruptly after Chapter 14 of Book 2. It might be assumed that Dante abandoned this text to begin its companion

Biography volume, the Convivio, in which he uses his own canzoni to illustrate the intellectual possibilities of the form (although, since that text is also unfinished, it is also possible that Dante abandoned the Convivio to work on De vulgari eloquentia). The Convivio, or “Banquet,” is structured metaphorically as a “feast of knowledge” in 14 courses. Each “course” is intended to be a separate canzone, followed by a philosophically informed analysis. Begun in Lucca about 1306 and continued as Dante moved about through 1308 (one theory says that Dante was in Paris between 1307 and 1309), the Convivio is unmistakably a book of exile. Aside from his occasional complaints in the text about his life as an expatriate, one has the sense that, after the loss of respect and honor that Dante must have felt during his exile, he intended to gain back his reputation through a treatise on the value and intellectual complexity of his own poetry. Further, reacting to the bitter political squabbles of his own city-state and the ecclesiastical authorities’ interference in secular matters that resulted in Dante’s own banishment, the poet makes a strong case in Book 4 of the Convivio for a universal world emperor. It was an ideal he would cling to for much of his remaining life. As De vulgari eloquentia does, the Convivio breaks off after analysis of only three of the promised 14 canzoni. Again in about 1308 Dante went on to matters that interested him more. It was 1308 or 1309 when Dante began work on his COMEDY. Certainly it was a new direction for him, both in its narrative format and in its Christian emphasis. Whereas in the lyric poetry of the Dolce stil novo virtually all of the dramatic action occurs in the poet’s own psyche, when Dante began work on the INFERNO he began to focus on the sights, sounds, and smells of the physical world and peopled his afterlife with his own acquaintances, with whom his pilgrim character engaged in dramatic verbal exchanges. Perhaps the new direction was inspired by the poet’s close reading of Virgil’s AENEID, another narrative poem of epic scale and scope, filled with dramatic episodes. Dante’s choice of Virgil as his guide into the realms of the afterlife was not made lightly. The Comedy was to demand virtually all of Dante’s literary efforts over the last 13 years of

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his life. Yet it appears that from the moment of its inception, Dante had a clear idea of the overall three-level structure and direction of the poem: There would be three canticles dealing with the three realms of the afterlife (Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven); there would be an even 100 cantos, with 33 cantos in each of the canticles and one additional introductory Canto in the Inferno; and the lines of the poem would be composed in interlocking three-line sets, or TERZA RIMA.

NEW HOPE While Dante was finishing the Inferno, the first canticle of his great epic of the afterlife, he was once again drawn into the politics of his age. This time it was the hope provided by a vigorous new emperor, HENRY VII OF LUXEMBOURG, that captured Dante’s interest and enthusiastic support. Henry stepped into a political office that had been vacant since the murder of the previous emperor, Albert I of Austria, by his own nephew, John of Swabia, in 1308. But the German electors were unable to choose between Albert’s son, Frederick of Austria, and the French prince Charles of Valois. At that point Henry’s brother, the archbishop of Trier, sponsored Henry’s candidacy among the German princes, and he was elected emperor at Frankfurt am Main in 1308. Henry began to expand his territories immediately by marrying his eldest son to Elizabeth of Bohemia, but his main ambition was to renew the earlier Imperial hegemony over Italy. In this he had the support of the French Pope Clement V, who had moved the seat of the papacy to Avignon in 1305. In about 1308, encouraged by his expectations for the promising new emperor, Dante began working on a prose text on political philosophy, which he was to call DE MONARCHIA. In it he argues that the chief goal of all human society is universal peace, that this peace can only be achieved through a single world government, and that a single world monarch was necessary to achieve this state. Ancillary to this view was Dante’s opinion regarding the papacy: The pope, according to Dante, had authority only in spiritual affairs and should not interfere with secular matters. Although work on De monarchia no doubt impeded his progress on the Inferno, Dante explains

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Critical Companion to Dante

that scholars like him have an obligation to take part in public debates concerning the common good, not simply to debate abstract concepts. Besides, Dante no doubt felt the hardship of trying to write his great work while worrying constantly about his own physical welfare as he bounced from benefactor to benefactor across Italy. A stable political situation in his home country would make the intellectual task of writing his magnum opus far less difficult. Meanwhile Henry readied his army to enter Italy in September 1310. In anticipation of this development, Pope Clement sent a letter addressed to the people of Italy, requesting that they acknowledge Henry as their new emperor, and welcome him as a peacemaker, whose chief role would be to end the civil strife that had torn the country apart and to bring peace. Dante was overjoyed at this new turn of events. In September 1310 from the Casentino Valley of Tuscany, where he was staying in the town of Poppi at the castle of Count Guido da Batifolle, he wrote an open letter to all of the lords of Italy. The letter urged the Italian people to welcome Henry as a peacemaker and to embrace the end of their internecine strife. Henry entered Italy in October 1310. He made his way first to Milan, where he was made king of Lombardy in a ceremony attended by Dante himself. One of Henry’s first acts, however, was to name a Ghibelline as his viceroy, an act that angered Italian Guelphs and, in particular, turned the Black Guelphs of Florence against him. Florence subsequently refused to acknowledge Henry’s imperial claim and would not receive him into the city. Back in the Casentino Valley, now the guest of Count Bandino, a frustrated Dante wrote two more open letters in spring 1311. The first of these, addressed to the “iniquitous” citizens of Florence on March 31, charges the Blacks with breaking the laws of God and man and accuses them of stupidity as well in their refusal to welcome Henry. But he goes on to warn them that if they do not receive him, Henry will invade the city and raze their new walls. Dante’s second letter, dated April 16 and addressed to Henry himself, urges the emperor to invade Florence immediately. It is Florence alone

that stands as the chief barrier to Henry’s unification of all Italy under his power. Whether Henry ever actually saw Dante’s letter is unknown, though Dante is known to have been in correspondence with Henry’s queen, the dynamic Margherita of Brabant. In any case Henry held off on dealing with Florence, choosing instead to besiege the Lombard town of Brescia, east of Milan. But as the year 1312 opened, Henry declared the Florentines to be rebels, yet still postponed dealing with them until he had entered Rome. On June 29, 1312, Henry was, somewhat belatedly, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in the Church of Saint John Lateran in Rome, meaning then to turn his attention to Florence. Now, with the conquest of Tuscany apparently imminent, Dante finally issued his treatise on the monarchy, essentially recognizing Henry as the new world emperor. In fall 1312, however, Henry’s wife, Margherita, died, an event that seems to have affected Henry’s drive and ambition. He entered Tuscany early in 1313 and besieged Florence, but without success. By this time Henry’s Imperial ambitions were beginning to worry Pope Clement, as well as ROBERT OF ANJOU, KING OF NAPLES, who expressed his opposition to Henry’s policies. Having failed to take Florence, and intending to punish Robert, whom he considered his vassal, Henry fell back to Pisa, then Siena, where he contracted malaria. It was there that he died of malarial fever on August 24, 1313.

THE GREAT WORK CONTINUES In 1312, shortly before Henry’s death, Dante returned to Verona. By 1315 he is known to have settled there permanently as the honored guest of CAN GRANDE DELLA SCALA, Imperial viceroy of that city. His residence in Verona lasted until 1318—the most extended single sojourn of his long exile. Here Dante enjoyed the kind of respite he needed to be able to make substantial headway on his great work. Can Grande was the younger brother of Dante’s previous patron, Bartolomeo della Scala, and was a young teenager when Dante had seen him last. Now at 23 the capable, generous, and much admired prince Can Grande gave Dante an apartment of his own in his palace, the Scaligeri palazzo, and sometimes invited the poet

Biography to dine at the prince’s own table. Two of Dante’s three sons—Pietro and the youngest, Iacopo— traveled to stay with him at Verona. His eldest son, Giovanni, seems to have been with Dante early in his exile, in Lucca, but there is no record of him after that. Dante’s wife, Gemma, and daughter, Antonia, had remained in Florence, where their gender kept them out of official danger, but where they led an impoverished life. By this time Dante was about 50 years old and, according to GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO (who spoke to citizens who knew Dante at this time), walked with a stoop and had dark, thick hair and a beard (in contrast to the clean-shaven poet who appears in all the usual portraits). While Can Grande’s guest, Dante finished and revised the Inferno, and it is known to have been in circulation by about 1314. He also composed and revised the complete text of the second canticle of the Commedia, the Purgatorio, and by 1318 copies of that text were in circulation. The lighter, more optimistic tone of the Purgatorio as compared with the Inferno is clearly a function of the former canticle’s more hopeful subject matter, but one cannot help suspecting that the tone is influenced, as well, by Dante’s own more pleasant circumstances. Undoubtedly before he left Verona, Dante had also begun and made some progress on the final canticle of the text, his Paradiso. Can Grande himself seems to have taken a sincere interest in Dante’s great project, and Dante wrote a famous “Letter to Can Grande,” probably after he had moved on to RAVENNA, in which he explains to the Veronese prince the allegorical plan of his Commedia. But all was not favorable for Dante during those years in Verona. Aside from the plight of his wife and daughter, he had to endure new difficulties from the Black Guelphs of Florence. A new threat to the city had arisen in the person of the Tuscan warlord UGUCCIONE DELLA FAGGIUOLA. In 1315 he had captured Lucca and threatened to invade Florence itself. In response to this threat, the Florentine government sought to swell its numbers by giving its numerous Ghibelline and White Guelph exiles a chance to return to their native city. Exiles would receive a pardon, the governmental decree said, if they would pay a reduced fine and

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go barefoot to the baptistery of San Giovanni with ropes around their necks. Enraged at the offer, Dante wrote to the Florentine officials, spurning their offer and refusing any act of penitence that would imply he was in any way guilty of the crimes of which he had been accused. The letter from the poet whose Inferno and Purgatorio had by now made him the most famous writer in Italy was taken as a major insult to the Florentine commonwealth, and when Uguccione dealt the Florentine army a devastating defeat at Montecatini in August, the Florentine officials took out much of their mortification and ire on Dante himself, reaffirming his previous death sentence and, for good measure, pronouncing the death sentence on his three sons as well.

RAVENNA Just why Dante decided to leave Verona is not clear. Perhaps he was finding the military atmosphere of Can Grande’s palace less to his liking than he had hoped. In any case, when he received an invitation in spring 1318 from GUIDO NOVELLO DA POLENTA, ruler of Ravenna, he decided to accept the offer. Guido, the nephew of FRANCESCA DA RIMINI (whom Dante had immortalized in Canto 5 of the Inferno), was a great admirer of Dante, who by now was recognized as the great Italian poet by virtue of the Inferno and Purgatorio, by then in circulation. He left Can Grande with profound gratitude for his hospitality and munificence, a gratitude sincerely expressed when Dante dedicated his Paradiso to the Veronese prince. The Adriatic city of Ravenna had the sort of rich history Dante would have enjoyed. In 402 C.E. it had replaced Rome as the imperial capital, and it was filled with beautifully decorated monuments and churches from its days of glory in the fifth and sixth centuries, including Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo with its splendid mosaics (commissioned by Theodoric the Ostrogoth) and the magnificent Basilica of San Vitale, the great church of the emperor JUSTINIAN I—perhaps it was, in part, Justinian’s history in Ravenna that inspired Dante to put into his mouth the history of the Roman Empire in Canto 6 of the Paradiso, the canticle Dante would complete in Ravenna.

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Critical Companion to Dante

It was later in 1318 that Dante moved to Ravenna with his sons Pietro and Iacopo (Dante’s oldest son, Giovanni, may still have been in Lucca). They were joined later by Gemma and Antonia, the reuniting of the family made possible through Guido’s generosity. In Ravenna as well were a number of other prominent Florentine refugees, who formed a kind of intellectual circle around Dante: These included the notary Pietro Giardini, the minor poet Dino Perini, and the physician and philosopher Fiduccio de’ Millotti. In addition Dante’s fame was such that he received communications from admirers throughout Italy. A Bolognese professor of literature, Giovanni del Virgilio (so named because of his admiration for Dante’s own idol, Virgil), sent Dante a Latin lyric eclogue in the Virgilian tradition, praising Dante’s Commedia but asserting that a work of its magnitude should have been composed in Latin. Giovanni also issued an invitation to Dante to visit Bologna, where he promised to crown Dante with the laurel—the symbol of his preeminence as “poet laureate.” With his typical flair and aplomb, Dante responded to Giovanni in kind. Dante’s Latin eclogue is exactly the same length as Giovanni’s but diplomatically declines Bologna’s offer: If he is to be crowned with the laurel, Dante says, he will only have it done in his native Florence. Sometime in 1320 Dante completed his mammoth work with the final editing of the Paradiso, and that third canticle was in circulation by the end of the year, serving only to cement Dante’s reputation as the premier poet of Italy. It is possible that Dante, renowned for his intellect and philosophical knowledge as well as his poetry, spent some of his time in Ravenna teaching or lecturing. In any case it is known that in winter 1320 he traveled back to Verona, where on January 20 he gave an invited lecture on the scientific question of whether anywhere on Earth water in its own sphere could reach a higher elevation than the land that rose out of it. In his lecture Dante contradicted the official position held by the 14th-century church in declaring that it was impossible for water to rise higher than Earth anywhere. One other request was made to Dante from Guido da Polenta himself and therefore could hardly be declined. In spring 1321 a sea battle had broken

out between ships of Ravenna and those of Venice, and as a result the powerful Venetian state was threatening to crush Ravenna. In August a desperate Guido called upon Dante to intervene, sending him along with other envoys to Venice on a mission of peace. By now Dante’s reputation for eloquence and for political argument, bolstered by the three canticles of the Commedia as well as the treatise De monarchia, was such that, according to legend, the Venetians were afraid even to let him speak. Whatever ensued at the conference, Dante and the other envoys secured peace, and a final peace agreement was signed later, in September 1321. It was Dante’s last important act. Returning to Ravenna via a land route from Venice, Dante had to pass through the unhealthy marshlands that lay between. On the journey Dante contracted malaria. The disease progressed quickly, and on the night of September 13–14, 1321, Dante Alighieri died of

Tomb of Dante, Ravenna, Italy (Photo by author)

Biography malarial fever, just as his “first friend,” Guido Cavalcanti, had perished 20 years earlier, and as his great Imperial hope Henry of Luxembourg had died less than a decade before. Dante was 56 years old.

AFTERMATH The great poet’s earthly remains, crowned posthumously with the laurel wreath, were buried at the church of San Francesco in Ravenna, where (despite Florentine efforts to have them removed) they remain to this day. The end of the Polenta family’s dominion in Ravenna postponed the erection of an appropriate tomb to the poet for some 150 years. But a decorous sepulcher, with a relief of Dante reading, was ultimately erected by the Venetian sculptor Pietro Lombardo in 1485, with an epitaph that mentions his poetry as well as his long exile from his “unloving mother,” the city of Florence. He was survived by at least two sons, his daughter, and his wife. Pietro remained close to Can Grande della Scala and with Can Grande’s support studied law at Bologna. He returned to Verona in the late 1320s to become a renowned judge. He also returned briefly to Florence (the death sentence having been lifted after his father’s demise), where he was able to recover his family’s Tuscan property (in Camerata and Pagnille) and divided the income from those estates with his younger brother, Iacopo. His own estate near Verona (acquired in 1353) remained in the Alighieri family for two centuries. But Pietro’s most important contribution to posterity is a Latin commentary on his father’s great poem that has been invaluable to subsequent readers and scholars of the Commedia. Iacopo, the youngest of Dante’s sons, received a generous income from Can Grande but made his home in Ravenna. He, too, spent some time working on a scholarly study of the Commedia, in which he traced the design and structure of the work. As for Dante’s oldest son, Giovanni, his history after accompanying his expatriate father to Lucca early in Dante’s years of exile is a blank slate. Nothing is known of his subsequent life. Nor do we know precisely how long Gemma outlived her husband, although there is documentary evidence that she was still alive as late as June 1333.

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Antonia, Dante’s daughter and apparently his youngest child, born in about 1300, made the decision to enter a nunnery not long after joining her father in Ravenna. She joined the convent of Santo Stefano degli Olivi in Ravenna in 1320 or 1321, taking the name of Sister Beatrice—the name that by that time, through her father’s poetry, was associated with the principal saints of Heaven. She lived a good long life, at least into her 70s, for she is named in a document from the year 1371 as “Sister Beatrice, daughter of Dante Alighieri.” By that time Dante’s reputation had spread throughout Europe, and one of his greatest admirers, the Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio, was about to begin a year-long series of lectures on Dante sponsored by the Commune of Florence. Though Boccaccio was seriously ill in 1372, he agreed to a request by some of the citizens of Florence to honor the poet they now recognized as their greatest citizen with a public reading and commentary on the Commedia. Boccaccio had already written and revised his Trattatello in laude di Dante (In Praise of Dante), a text modeled partly on Virgil’s biographies of Donatus and Servius and partly on medieval saints’ lives, in which Dante is extolled as a poet-hero. Thus Boccaccio was the acknowledged Dante expert in Florence and began his lecture series at the church of Santo Stefano di Badia on October 23, 1373. He gave some 55 public lectures but eventually succumbed to his illness and had to abandon the lecture series after Canto 17 of the Inferno. Boccaccio died late in 1375, but his lecture notes have survived and are known as the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante. In his lectures Boccaccio interprets each canto of the Commedia first in a literal, then in an allegorical sense. Thus he systematically applies to Dante’s vernacular text the traditional fourfold allegorical interpretation conventionally used for biblical commentary—a method that Dante himself had encouraged in his “Letter to Can Grande” and that other commentators had been applying to the Commedia since its first appearance. Boccaccio’s lectures signal a change in Florence’s opinion of her greatest son—the city’s posthumous forgiveness and acceptance of the exiled poet whom the citizens now wished to claim as their own. As a consequence Florence began a vigorous campaign

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Critical Companion to Dante

to have Dante’s remains transferred to the city of his birth that had rejected him when he was alive. The Commonwealth of Florence petitioned Ravenna in 1396, in 1430, and again in 1476 to have Dante’s remains translated to his native city. Ravenna denied each of these pleas. Under the Florentine Medici pope Leo X these demands became particularly difficult to resist, and in 1519 a papal emissary appeared in Ravenna with a charge from Pope Leo to deliver up Dante’s body, which was to be taken back to Florence and delivered to Michelangelo, who would construct an appropriately glorious tomb for the poet. But when the crypt was opened, Dante’s remains could not be found. They had been stolen by Franciscan monks of Ravenna and hidden away. Again in 1677 Dante’s body was moved, this time into a wooden chest with an inscription in ink on its lid, reading Dantis ossa a me Fre Antonio Santi hic posita Ano 1677 die 18 Octobris (“Dante’s bones placed here by me, Friar Antonio Santi, October 18, 1677”). That box stayed hidden for nearly 200 years, although a small but stately neoclassical temple was built by the Ravenna architect Camillo Morigia in 1780 to house the empty sepulcher. But construction workers repairing the Braccioforte Chapel on the grounds of the Church of San Francesco fortuitously uncovered the body on May 27, 1865. Dante now rests once more in his sepulcher in his adopted city of Ravenna, much to the disappointment of Florence. One cannot help but suspect that Dante would have wanted it that way.

FURTHER READING Anderson, William. Dante the Maker. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Auerbach, Eric. Dante: Poet of the Secular World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Barbi, Michele. Life of Dante. Translated by Paul Ruggiers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960. Bergin, Thomas G. Dante. New York: Orion Press, 1965.

The Dante death mask (Bargello, Florence) is now thought to be not a death mask but rather an extremely convincing portrait executed at an unknown date, but probably later than the Naples bust. From Dante and His World, by Thomas Caldecot Chubb, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966.

Hollander, Robert. Dante: A Life in Works. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Lewis, R. W. B. Dante. New York: Penguin, 2001. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. “Life of Dante.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, 1–13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Quinones, Ricardo J. Dante Alighieri. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Wicksteed, Philip H., trans. The Early Lives of Dante. London: Alexander Moring, 1904.

PART II

Works A to Z

La commedia

La commedia (The Divine Comedy) (ca. 1307–1321) OVERVIEW Dante’s crowning achievement, one of the most important works in Western literature and undisputedly the most important poetic text of the European Middle Ages, is the great poem he calls his Comedy, or Commedia. This seems an odd title for most modern readers, who see little humor in the poem. But there are two reasons Dante calls the poem a comedy. The first, as explained by BENVENUTO DA IMOLA, one of the early Italian commentators on the poem, is that the Comedy (composed in Italian rather than Latin) is written in a vernacular language—an assertion that gains support from Dante’s own comments in Book 2 of DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA, where he defines comedy in terms of style and diction. The other reason for the title has more to do with the poem’s narrative pattern: Since the poem begins in sorrow (the dark wood of sin) and ends in joy (the vision of God), one can easily argue that the poem’s movement parallels the plot of a comedy. Commentators in the 14th century, including Dante’s disciple GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO, began calling the Comedy “Divine” both because of its sacred subject matter and because of its literary significance. Most scholars believe that Dante began composing the Comedy in 1306 or 1307, a few years after his exile from FLORENCE. Since the subject matter of the poem is the journey of a lost pilgrim, who must trek through the three realms of the afterlife on a journey back to his true home, it could be argued that the state of the pilgrim Dante parallels that of the exiled poet. The journey is of course also an ALLEGORY of the soul’s journey to God. Thus the three realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven might be interpreted as three steps in the soul’s redemption, Hell demonstrating the recognition of sin, Purgatory the expiation of sin, and Paradise the holy living that follows. This sequence reflects the three-step process of the sacrament of penance, which involves confession, penance, and absolution, portrayed as the pilgrim Dante moves through the INFERNO (which suggests prevenient

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grace, or the conviction of sin), the PURGATORIO (justifying grace, or the assurance of forgiveness), and the PARADISO (sanctifying grace, or the movement toward holy living). This overall three-part organization is one aspect of a remarkably detailed symbolic structure that stands as one of the noteworthy aspects of the Comedy. As a Gothic cathedral does, the Comedy reflects in its structure the perfect harmony of God’s creation and, at the same time, the mystery of the Holy Trinity. The organization of the poem makes extensive use of the numbers 3 (reflecting the Trinity) and 1 (reflecting God’s essential unity). There are the three main sections of the poem (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) called canticles (or cantiche in Italian, singular cantica). Each canticle contains 33 chapters, or cantos, but the Inferno has one additional canto that introduces the entire poem, making the total number of cantos the perfect number 100. The verse form that Dante created specifically for his poem is called TERZA RIMA, rhyming aba bcb cdc and so forth. The tercets (or three-line stanzas) suggest the Trinity and are interlocked, suggesting unity as well. Dante uses the standard Italian hendecasyllabic (or 11-syllable) line, so that each tercet contains 33 syllables—the same as the number of cantos appearing in each canticle and, probably not coincidentally, the age of Christ at the time of his crucifixion. The number 9 (3 times 3) is also significant in the poem’s structure. Dante divides his Inferno into nine circles and follows standard medieval astronomy by including nine spheres in his Heaven. Purgatory contains seven terraces corresponding to the seven deadly sins, plus an Ante-Purgatory (for those who must wait before climbing the peak), and the Earthly Paradise at the top of the mountain. Furthermore, the nine sections of each canticle are arranged into larger three-part structures: In the Inferno, the sins are grouped into three kinds—incontinence, violence, and malicious fraud, represented symbolically by the three beasts (the she-wolf, lion, and leopard) of Canto 1. Purgatory, as Dante’s guide Virgil explains in Canto 17 of that text, is structured according to three kinds of defects in love: Love, which motivates all human actions, even sin, can be misdirected, insufficient,

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La commedia

or perverted, and these defects provide the bases for the organization of Purgatory’s terraces. Even in Paradise the souls of the blessed are arranged according to their own capacities for experiencing God’s grace, and thus their vision might be limited or incomplete, as is the case of the souls in the lower spheres; it might be attained through the cardinal virtues; or it might be the perfect vision of the angels. Although it will be discussed in some detail in the commentary that follows, it seems useful to consider briefly Dante’s use of allegory here at the outset. On one level the events and characters of the Comedy are in a sense literal or historical. Dante is careful to set the events in real time: His journey begins on Good Friday in the year 1300, and he arrives on the shores of Purgatory on the morning of Easter Sunday of that year. He spends three nights on Mount Purgatory and then ascends into Heaven, from which he returns in the end to his life in Florence. Setting his poem in his own recent past means, of course, that Dante can only include in his afterlife the souls of people who had died before April 1300, but it also enables Dante to place prophetic utterances into the mouths of some of the characters the pilgrim meets. Thus he is able to tell the story of his own exile as well as “predict” the coming of the emperor HENRY VII OF LUXEMBOURG. Hell is conceived as a funnel-shaped cavern descending to the center of the earth, and Purgatory as a mountain emerging from the ocean of the Southern Hemisphere—a mountain formed from the land displaced when Lucifer’s fall from Heaven created the great pit of Hell. Heaven consists of the nine spheres identified by medieval astronomers—the seven planets, the fixed stars, and the Primum Mobile or First Mover. This is conventional medieval geography and cosmography. Further Dante depicts himself as a historical figure, ultimately banned from Florence for political reasons. Beatrice is the beautiful Beatrice Portinari, the unattainable beloved of Dante’s earlier love poetry whose death he describes in the VITA NUOVA. Virgil is the classical Roman poet of the AENEID, the literary genius whose text glorified and idealized the destiny of the Roman Empire

and Dante’s poetic idol. The souls Dante meets in the afterlife—from CIACCO or VANNI FUCCI in the Inferno to FORESE DONATI in Purgatory or his own ancestor CACCIAGUIDA in Heaven—are literal historical persons, often with the same political virtues and vices that they possessed in life. At the same time, however, the poem recounts the journey of the soul of everyman, traveling toward moral perfection and ultimate salvation. Dante the pilgrim, as distinct from the historical Dante the poet, is the personification of the human soul. Beatrice, who sends Virgil to guide Dante on his way, represents divine grace and, in her role as Dante’s guide through Heaven, divine wisdom as well. Virgil represents human reason, the faculty by which human beings may recognize sin and move toward faith—but since salvation can be attained only through grace, it is Beatrice, not Virgil, who must guide Dante into Heaven. Further the individual characters Dante meets on his journey transcend their own historical selves and become representatives of their own sins or virtues. The complexity of Dante’s allegory is discussed in the controversial “Letter to Can Grande” (Epistle 13), a lengthy introduction purported to have been sent by Dante to his patron CAN GRANDE DELLA SCALA of VERONA along with a copy of the Paradiso. While some scholars doubt its authenticity, others accept the letter and its assertion that the Comedy should be read in the same way that scholars interpreted the Bible, so that the reader of the Comedy should perceive three different allegorical senses in addition to the historical sense. Thus it is possible to read The Divine Comedy in a number of ways: If one focuses on the literal and historical characters, the Comedy can be read as a political statement reinforcing Dante’s arguments in DE MONARCHIA about the necessity of a single world emperor in Rome to check the secular power of popes like POPE BONIFACE VIII, whose machinations had led to Dante’s exile. On the moral level of the allegory, however, the Comedy demonstrates the development of the pilgrim everyman from a very limited spiritual understanding in the beginning to a true confirmation to the will of God by the end. On a typological level the pilgrim’s moral

La commedia development mirrors the salvation history revealed in the Scriptures. The Comedy made Dante a celebrity in Italy from the time of the first appearance of the Inferno, which was in circulation by 1314. There were 12 early commentaries on the poem that attest to its enormous popularity in the 14th century, and Giovanni Boccaccio enhanced the poem’s reputation through his public lectures on the Comedy presented in Florence in 1373–74. Poets from FRANCESCO (FRANCIS) PETRARCH to Chaucer, to Longfellow and T. S. Eliot, have been inspired by Dante’s text, which has been translated into dozens of languages. More than 400 editions of the poem have appeared in Italy since the 15th century. Several new translations of the poem have appeared in English in the past 20 years (quotations in the following commentary are drawn from Mark Musa’s translation). Clearly the poem has spoken to readers all over the world for hundreds of years, and current readers still find much to admire in the poem through the various contemporary editions.

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diso. That we are dealing with the influential poet Dante is also clear in Purgatorio 24, when the Luccan poet Bonagiunta praises Dante for his “sweet new style” (DOLCE STIL NOVO). His poetic vocation is also foregrounded in Cacciaguida’s charge to him in Paradiso 17 to write all he has seen and hold nothing back. Further, the protagonist is clearly the historical Dante, citizen of Florence, in his political beliefs—his looking forward to a world emperor to curb the secular power of the papacy, his enmity with Ghibellines like Farinata in Inferno 10 or the Black Guelphs whom he condemns in Paradiso 15. Finally the character is also Dante the human lover in what he reveals about his love for Beatrice, the woman he had loved and whose death he writes of in the Vita nuova—a text with which he seems to have expected his readers to have been familiar.

MAJOR CHARACTERS IN THE COMMEDIA Dante the Pilgrim Dante uses a first-person narrator in the poem, much as medieval poets did in what were called “dream-vision poems”—poems that purported to relate an enigmatic dream whose symbols needed interpretation by the reader. Dante’s poem is no dream vision—he presents it as the record of an actual event—but as the dream vision did, the Comedy’s allegory challenged the reader to unlock its various levels of meaning. Thus the first-person narrator is not to be regarded as the historical Dante Alighieri, but a fictionalized version of the poet who also becomes an allegorical figure. To be sure the character of Dante the pilgrim is in many ways identical to Dante the poet. He is the Dante who would in 1302 suffer unjust exile from his home city of Florence, and many of the characters, with the foreknowledge of departed souls, make numerous predictions about his future exile, beginning with Ciacco’s clouded prophecy in Canto 6 of the Inferno and culminating with Cacciaguida’s straightforward warning in Canto 17 of the Para-

The Michelino Dante is a tempera panel painted by Domenico di Michelino in 1465 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Dante’s birth. From Dante and His World, by Thomas Caldecot Chubb, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966.

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La commedia

Thus it is Beatrice who sends Virgil to save the protagonist, and it is the thought of actually seeing Beatrice again that sees Dante through his greatest fear—the ring of fire that bars the entrance into Paradise (Purgatorio 27). It is Beatrice he meets in the Earthly Paradise atop Mount Purgatory, a heavenly Beatrice who calls him by name—“Dante”— when she sees him in Purgatorio 30, l. 55. It is clear, however, that the protagonist of the poem cannot literally be the historical Dante— and not only because the historical Dante never actually visited the three realms of the afterlife. Dante the pilgrim is both the individual fictionalized depiction of the poet, and at the same time the representative of human beings in general. His wandering into the dark wood of sin in the first canto and his desire to overcome his sin and find his way to God are universal human traits, and so the pilgrim Dante becomes, allegorically, an Everyman figure in the poem. As must all human beings, according to Dante’s medieval Christian viewpoint, the pilgrim must first recognize the nature of sin (as he does in the Inferno), make satisfaction for his sin (as he does in the Purgatorio), and increase in wisdom, joy, and love through holy living (as he does in the Paradiso). In this way the pilgrim Dante is a dynamic character, moving from sin to salvation, from ignorance to wisdom, from despair to joy, through his journey toward God. As is true of medieval allegory in general, the character of Dante the pilgrim does not emerge as a fully rounded, multifaceted individual, as might be expected of a more modern protagonist in the realistic tradition. We know that he is 35 years old at the beginning of his journey, but even that is a symbolic age, midway through the journey of life, a turning point for the character to take a new direction and make a new start. As Everyman he displays the kinds of fears that anyone would show in, for example, entering Hell, or riding on the back of the monster Geryon in Inferno 17. He often weeps or shows pity for the sufferings of sinners in Hell (notably Francesca da Rimini in Inferno 5), until his guide, Virgil, convinces him that to do so is to question God’s justice. He also displays a certain vanity when he is welcomed among the great poets of antiquity in Inferno 4,

and righteous anger when he sees Pope Nicholas among the simonists in Inferno 19. As he moves through Purgatory, it is no surprise (having seen these traits in Hell) that the pilgrim expects to spend some time on the terraces of pride, anger, and lust when he returns upon his death to this part of the afterlife. Later he displays a very human eagerness to see again his beloved Beatrice after 10 years, and a very human humiliation when she chides him at their first meeting in Purgatorio 30. In Paradise the pilgrim’s thirst for knowledge and eagerness to learn all he can about the workings of the universe also are no surprise. Finally the pilgrim is not presented with great particularity, but is broadly defined by traits that may seem appropriate for a figure representing Everyman. The pilgrim’s reactions, however, should not generally be taken as reflecting those of Dante the poet, particularly in the Inferno. When the pilgrim swoons at Francesca’s story of her love affair or weeps at the fate of his old mentor BRUNETTO LATINI among the sodomites (Inferno 15), the reader must remember that Dante the poet has placed Francesca and Brunetto in Hell. The pilgrim’s reactions, therefore, are inappropriate, but a part of the process he is going through, learning to recognize sin. On another level these reactions are part of a pattern in which the pilgrim Dante is shown participating in the various sins: Sometimes he participates through sympathy, sometimes through displaying the sin itself, as when he expresses his anger at FILIPPO ARGENTI (Inferno 8), or when he breaks his word to FRIAR (Fra) ALBERIGO (Inferno 33). Even his pride at joining the group of classical poets in Inferno 4 is misguided, since these poets are not in Heaven, and to take pride in his position among them would be to trust in human intellect rather than divine guidance for salvation—and to end in Limbo rather than Paradise. These actions, too, can be read as part of the pilgrim’s education: He is learning to see the potential of all sins within himself, and thus the need for contrition and penance as demonstrated throughout the Purgatorio. Remarkably at the end of the Paradiso Dante the pilgrim and Dante the poet merge again, as Dante presents himself no longer as a character completing his pilgrimage and experiencing a vision

La commedia of God, but as a poet, sitting in his study some time after his return from Paradise, trying with difficulty to remember the experience (Paradiso 33, ll. 60–84), and praying for the ability to put what he could remember into words. This final vision, with Dante’s suggestion that this fiction is indeed no fiction, once more conflates pilgrim and poet and serves the function of conferring on the poet the authority of one who, as the pilgrim, had actually experienced this journey. Virgil For Dante Virgil was the most important poet of antiquity, his poetry the model of classical style and intellectual expression. He thus makes Virgil his guide through both The Inferno and the Purgatorio even though, as a pagan, Virgil cannot enter Paradise and must turn back when the pilgrim Dante reaches the Garden of Eden at the peak of Mount Purgatory. Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 B.C.E.) was author of the greatest Latin epic poem, the Aeneid, the story of the Trojan Aeneas and his escape from burning Troy, chronicling his legendary adventures after the Trojan War and culminating in his settlement in Italy, where his descendants founded the city of Rome. In one sense Virgil is a guide for Dante the poet, who looks at Virgil’s epic style and imitates it at times—particularly in his use of epic similes—throughout his own great poem. There are literally hundreds of allusions to or echoes of Virgilian lines in the lines of the Comedy. Dante calls Virgil’s epic a “tragedy” (Inferno 20, l. 113) shortly before referring to his own poem as a “comedy” (Inferno 21, l. 2), suggesting a parallel but contrasting relationship between the two great poems. It is a short step from Virgil, the author’s poetic guide, to Virgil, the character’s physical guide. Dante saw Virgil as an appropriate guide since, in Book 6 of his Aeneid, Virgil had described Aeneas’s journey into Hades and vision of the afterlife. To this Dante adds a myth of his own making, that Virgil had been summoned by the witch Erichto to fetch a spirit for her from the lowest depths of Hell (Inferno 9, ll. 22–30). Thus Virgil knows his way. Why Dante should choose a pagan Roman poet to guide him through the Christian afterlife is a diffi-

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cult question to answer, but in part it must certainly spring from Virgil’s famous FOURTH ECLOGUE, a poem generally read in the Middle Ages as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. Thus Virgil was often seen as a great prophet ironically unaware of the significance of his own prophesies. Most readers through the years have interpreted Virgil allegorically as human Reason. Thus he is able to guide the pilgrim Everyman through the recognition of sin in the Inferno and even contrition for sin in the Purgatorio but cannot, unaided by revelation, guide the soul of Everyman to salvation. As Reason Virgil is generally shown to be knowledgeable, wise, moderate, and restrained (much like Aeneas, the stoic hero of his own epic). In Hell his knowledge is unfaltering—he knows how to get past the three-headed dog Cerberus in Inferno 6 and the threatening Minotaur in Inferno 12 and knows how to climb down the legs of Satan to move out of Hell in Inferno 34. Never having been in Purgatory, he must work his way through that realm just as his pilgrim ward must, yet his wisdom enables him to discourse on, for example, difficult concepts such as the nature of sin and love in Purgatorio 17. But even here he admits that his definition of love includes only the aspects of love that reason can understand—Dante must wait for Beatrice to explain love as it pertains to faith (Purgatorio 18, ll. 46–48). Since he represents Reason unaided by revelation, Virgil can guide Dante no farther than the peak of Mount Purgatory. Beatrice must take over there to guide the pilgrim the rest of the way. It would be a mistake, though, to see Virgil as nothing more than the empty allegorical figure of Reason. As Dante’s guide and mentor, Virgil displays some very human traits. As a teacher, he constantly reinforces lessons that he expects Dante the pilgrim to learn from his encounters in Hell and Purgatory. He shows impatience with his pupil when the pilgrim continues to express sympathy for the damned, and sometimes even an angry frustration when he sees the pilgrim as easily distracted by the sinful shades, as he is by MASTER ADAM and SINON the Greek in Inferno 30. But he also acts as a father figure for the pilgrim: He is careful to protect his charge from any hostile threats—he tells Dante

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to hide from the devils in the bolgia (or ditch) of the grafters, for instance (Inferno 21), seeing a special danger to the pilgrim there. He rides with the pilgrim on the back of the monster Geryon, placing himself between the pilgrim and the monster’s venomous tail. At one point he even picks up the pilgrim and carries him, when he sees the need to escape quickly from the devils of the grafters’ bolgia in Inferno 23. Virgil is at his most human when he is thwarted or frustrated. Before the gates of Dis in Canto 9, he and the pilgrim are barred from entering the city—for the first time his claim of divine sanction for his journey falls on deaf ears. Virgil is clearly worried and confused, though he tries to reassure the pilgrim, until the heavenly messenger arrives to open the gates. Later he seems quite put out that the devil Malacoda lied to him about the bridge over the sixth bolgia, and angry that he has fallen for the lie. Virgil’s major weakness, of course, is that he is damned. He is an inhabitant of Limbo, the upper circle of Hell reserved for those who, though virtuous, did not believe in Christ. Despite his journey through Purgatory and his witnessing of the workings of contrition and penance leading to salvation, Virgil has not received the divine grace he would need to acquire a saving faith in Jesus Christ. This becomes all too clear when Dante introduces in Purgatorio 22 the character of PUBLIUS PAPINUS STATIUS, the Latin author of the Thebaid and poetic disciple of Virgil. Statius declares that he was saved through reading Virgil’s works, having found faith in Christ through reading the Fourth Eclogue. Thus Virgil is ultimately pictured as a tragic figure, one who (as in the case of Dante the pilgrim himself) is able to lead others to salvation but who remains blind to the truth of revelation himself. Perhaps the most poignant section of the entire Comedy is the point at which Dante the pilgrim, having made his way to the Earthly Paradise and finally gained sight of his beloved Beatrice, turns to speak of her to Virgil and finds his guide has disappeared (Purgatorio 30, ll. 49–54). As Virgil had done so often before, Beatrice must check the pilgrim, this time for mourning the loss of Virgil. It is Dante’s farewell to the secular world of intellect.

Reason without revelation is far too limited and must be transcended in the poem as well as in life. Virgil must return to Limbo. Beatrice The figure of Beatrice is perhaps the most complex image in the Divine Comedy. On the literal level she is, of course, that same Beatrice whom Dante describes as his beloved lady in the VITA NUOVA. According to that text it was May Day, 1274, when the nine-year-old Dante first met Bici Portinari, the daughter of his neighbor Folco, and fell in love with her, calling her Beatrice, or “bringer of blessings.” He began writing poems to her in about 1283 and continued to love her as an ideal even after her marriage to the banker SIMONE DE’ BARDI in 1287. It was to write praises of her as an angelic creature that Dante invented a new style of poetry in the CANZONE Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore (“Ladies who have intelligence of love”). Even after her death on June 8, 1290, Dante seems to have continued to view Beatrice as an ideal, now returned to her native heavenly element. At the end of the Vita nuova Dante vows not to write of Beatrice again until he can write of her what has never been written before about any other woman. This promise is fulfilled in the Comedy. Beatrice’s chief role in the Comedy is to act as Dante’s guide from the Earthly Paradise atop Mount Purgatory into the highest Heaven. Before this, however, she serves as the motive and impetus for the pilgrim Dante’s whole journey, for it is she, at the urging of Dante’s patron saint, SAINT LUCY (inspired by the Virgin Mary), who visits Virgil in Limbo and asks him to go to Dante and be his guide through Hell and Purgatory (Inferno 2, ll. 52–118). It is Virgil’s mention of Beatrice that moves the pilgrim Dante to travel forward on his journey, and his continued references to her inspire the pilgrim to continue when his will seems to be flagging, as in Purgatorio 27, when he must go through the ring of fire. On the literal level, of course, Beatrice is the earthly woman, seeing one who loved her lost and threatened and sending help for pity of him. Allegorically, however, Beatrice here suggests divine grace, without which, according to Scholastic philosophers, one could not begin to seek salvation.

Inferno The love that inspires Beatrice to act can also, allegorically, suggest spiritual love. Thus here and generally throughout the Comedy Beatrice represents God’s grace and love. The fact that the pagan Virgil recognizes her significance implies another meaning for Beatrice. Recalling that she leaves her seat in Heaven beside Rachel (who represents the contemplative life), some scholars have suggested that for Virgil Beatrice represents Lady Philosophy as she appeared to ANICIUS MANLIUS SEVERINUS BOETHIUS in the Consolation of Philosophy. This last suggestion gathers strength from Beatrice’s role in the Paradiso. Here she is Dante’s guide through the heavenly spheres, and her function is to answer his many questions about the cosmos and about theology. In this role she clearly allegorically represents Divine Wisdom. However, the fact that Beatrice becomes more radiant and beautiful each step they take closer to God and the Empyrean Heaven reinforces her allegorical role as Divine Love, which delights more the nearer one draws to God himself. This role as Divine Wisdom reinforces Beatrice’s most striking appearance in the Comedy, in the Earthly Paradise at the end of the Purgatorio. Here she descends from Heaven in a mystic chariot, clothed in white, green, and red (the colors of the three theological virtues—faith, hope, and love). Her face is veiled, as she withholds from the pilgrim the sight of her eyes and smile, the chief marks of her beauty that he had so praised in his poems to her earthly incarnation. Those beauties allegorically represent God’s love, which here is veiled in part because it will blind the pilgrim when he finally does see it, and in part because this is a scene of judgment. At this point Beatrice allegorically represents Christ himself: As she has appeared to judge the individual soul of the pilgrim, so Christ will judge all humankind on Judgment Day. The role of Beatrice as allegorical Christ figure should be no surprise. If she does indeed represent Divine Wisdom, it should be remembered that in the Jewish “Wisdom” tradition, Wisdom was pictured as female and said to have been with God from the beginning of creation. That figure of Wisdom was conflated with the Greek concept of logos in the first chapter of the Gospel according to John,

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so that logos/Wisdom became the coeternal Second Person of the Trinity. In Dante’s story Beatrice had descended into Limbo in order to save the pilgrim, just as Christ had descended into Limbo to save all the imprisoned faithful from the beginning of time. Her death had led Dante to thoughts of Heaven, just as Christ’s death had all Christians. And here in Canto 30 of the Purgatorio Beatrice has descended again, like the Son of Man appearing in glory to judge the living and the dead on the last day. She forces Dante to account for the sins of his life, which chiefly involved his desertion of her memory to pursue other earthly goods—another woman, in fact, as well as the worldly knowledge that philosophy could give him. While it is certainly true that Beatrice the literal woman seems to be present at this point, chiding her lover for being unfaithful to her memory, she is at the same time Christ himself, calling the sinner to account for his actions before finally taking him into Heaven and ultimate salvation. Finally Beatrice becomes again the literal soul of the earthly Bice Portinari, when she turns her charge over to his final guide, Saint Bernard, in Canto 31 of the Paradiso. Having led the pilgrim this far, she returns finally to her place in the Heavenly Rose, beside Rachel, and after a last look at her former lover, turns her eyes eternally to God, with the implication that he should follow suit.

Inferno (1314) The Inferno has always been the most widely read of the three canticles of the Comedy. Some have suggested that the reason for this is that sin is far more interesting to most people than virtue. In fact the Inferno most likely owes its popularity to the concrete and memorable portraits of some of the individual sinners portrayed in its text: FRANCESCA DA RIMINI, excusing her adultery with Paolo while being blown about by the winds of passion in Canto 2; ULYSSES, describing his mad dash toward Purgatory in Canto 26; BERTRAN DE BORN, holding out his severed head like a lantern in Canto 28; Count UGOLINO DELLA GHERARDESCA’s account of his slow starvation locked in a tower with his children in

28 Inferno Canto 33. These images are depicted permanently on the canvas of Western literature. To understand the Inferno beyond this collection of individual portraits, however, it is important, first, to understand its structure. A reader might first expect that the sinners in Hell will be arranged according to the customary medieval hierarchy of the seven deadly sins. But while that arrangement provides the structure of Dante’s Purgatory, it is absent from the Inferno. In part this is probably because the convention of the seven deadly sins is a Christian construct, and Hell is outside the church entirely. The organization, therefore, is borrowed from ARISTOTLE’s classification of sins in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle’s three categories are incontinence (i.e., uncontrolled passion), malice (by which he also implies fraud), and bestiality (probably implying violence). Thus Dante’s Hell punishes first those sinners guilty of lust, gluttony, and such lapses of control as are implied by Aristotle’s incontinence. Next Dante includes those guilty of violent sins like murder or suicide. Finally, and in the most detail, he describes the various sins involving fraud and malice, which he finds worse than sins of violence because they involve the perverted use of the human intellect. These three categories are represented in the first canto of the Inferno by three beasts—a she-wolf (suggesting incontinence), a lion (suggesting violence), and a leopard (suggesting fraud and malice)—who threaten the pilgrim Dante and prevent his ascent toward the light of grace. The pilgrim finds that before he can begin his ascent—before he can begin his journey toward God—he must humble himself by journeying through Hell. For one thing, this enables him to clear his soul of the worldly passions and values that governed his day-to-day life before his turn toward God. The characters he encounters all reveal their own values, whether it is Francesca and her praise of courtly love or FARINATA DEGLI UBERTI with his patriotic values in Canto 10 or BRUNETTO LATINI and his defense of learning in Canto 15. These values, which may have seemed legitimate to the pilgrim Dante or to the reader, are subtly undercut by their proponents’ residence in Hell. But the task of the pilgrim Dante, and of the reader, is to recognize sin in all its forms. Thus Dante is often depicted sympathizing with

the sinners—fainting at Francesca’s story, showing sympathy for Ciacco the hog or for Brunetto. This sympathy is part of a larger pattern that depicts the pilgrim Dante as participating in the various sins, whether by expressing sympathy or by displaying the sin itself (as in his anger at FILIPPO ARGENTI DEGLI ADIMARI in Canto 8), or by symbolically participating (as in his breaking of the baptismal font in the circle punishing simony in Canto 19). As everyman Dante the pilgrim must recognize the existence of these various sins in himself in order to reject them and move on to salvation. The punishments depicted in Dante’s Hell are carefully considered and reflect what Bertran de Born calls in Canto 28 a contrapasso (i.e., a counterpenalty). This system follows the sort of retributive idea of justice recommended in the Old Testament’s call for “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” As the lustful were at the mercy of their uncontrolled passions in life, so in death they are blown about uncontrollably by winds. As the violent shed blood in life, so in death they are boiled in a river of blood. Allegorically the sinners also are personifications of the sin itself, so that their persuasiveness and attractiveness—in the case of the alluring Francesca, for example, or the indomitable Ulysses in Canto 26—suggest the appealing nature of certain kinds of sin. On a moral level, though, it is useful to remember that the contrapasso is simply a repetition of the characters’ sins. The sin itself is its own punishment in Hell—just as, Dante seems to imply, sin is its own punishment on earth. If that is the case, Dante may be suggesting that sin is in fact Hell, and that theologically sin is the moral equivalent of Hell. Ultimately then for the reader as well as for Dante’s pilgrim, the journey through Hell is a learning experience—the kind of learning experience that should change his life.

INTRODUCTION AND UPPER HELL (CANTOS 1–4) Synopsis The first canto opens, we are told, halfway through “our” life—probably, that is, when the narrator is about the age of 35. The speaker of the poem—usually called “Dante the pilgrim” to distinguish the character in the poem from the historical Dante

Inferno    29 the poet—awakens to find himself alone and lost in a dark forest. He has wandered off the true path and now cannot find his way out of a frighteningly dark and dismal valley. Looking up, he sees a lofty hill whose top is bathed in sunshine. Thinking he has found a way out of the darkness, the pilgrim Dante begins to climb the hill toward the light, but his way is blocked by three ferocious beasts: first by a lion, then by a leopard, and finally by a she-wolf, which pursues him most viciously of all. The three beasts force the pilgrim Dante to abandon his climb and retreat back into the dark valley. As he is about to despair, a human figure emerges before him. It turns out to be the shade or soul of the great Latin poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid and Dante’s idol. Dante tells Virgil about the beasts that threatened him and asks for Virgil’s help. Virgil responds that Dante cannot overcome the beasts because the she-wolf alone destroys anyone who approaches her and the beasts will remain where they are until a greyhound chases them all back to Hell, where they live. The only way, then, to reach the light and escape from the dark wood is to follow Virgil along a different path. Virgil tells the pilgrim he will guide him through Hell and through Purgatory, at which point a more worthy guide will appear to lead Dante into Heaven. Uplifted by Virgil’s promises, Dante accepts his guidance, and as Virgil begins the journey, the pilgrim Dante follows. As the second canto opens, Dante says that he began to follow Virgil as night was falling on the first day of the journey (Good Friday, as we learn later), and he says that he will tell of his experience and of the pity involved in his trip through Hell. He then invokes the muses to help him tell his story. First, though, Dante speaks of his doubts. He tells Virgil that he feels unworthy to make this journey, citing Saint Paul and the hero of Virgil’s own great poem, Aeneas, as his predecessors on the trek through the eternal landscapes of Heaven and Hell. Virgil chides Dante for his fear and reassures him by relating the story of how he became Dante’s guide. Dante’s great love Beatrice, he says, had left her place in Heaven to enter Hell itself to ask Virgil to be Dante’s guide. When Virgil asked her how she came to be there, she related how the Virgin

The Forest, from Canto 1 of the Inferno, by Gustave Doré. From Dante’s Inferno, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and Illustrated with the Designs of M. Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1885.

Mary took pity on Dante’s plight and approached Saint Lucy, to whom Dante seems to have been especially devoted. Saint Lucy in turn turned to Beatrice, who was sitting in contemplation with the Old Testament figure Rachel. Upon Lucy’s urging Beatrice left her honored place in Heaven to go to the aid of the one who in life had loved her so dearly, and as she recounted her story to Virgil in Limbo, she wept. How then, Virgil asks Dante, can the pilgrim hesitate, when three such blessed ladies have done so much to help him, and when Virgil himself has offered to be his escort? Upon hearing how his beloved Beatrice cares for him even in Heaven and taking heart at Virgil’s account, Dante rallies his spirits and sets his face toward Hell. The third Canto opens with the inscription carved over the gate into Hell itself: This gate, leading into what it calls a “city” of woe, was designed,

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the inscription says, by divine power, wisdom, and love, moved by justice. The inscription ends with the ominous charge to anyone entering the gate to “abandon all hope.” Dante momentarily balks at these words, but, reassured by Virgil, he moves through the gate and stands in the vestibule of Hell—a kind of entry hall into the main realm of the Inferno. Here the poets encounter their first group of souls: Dante sees innumerable shades, all chasing a banner that eternally runs before them as they themselves are chased and tormented by swarms of flies and hornets. The blood that flows down from their wounded bodies feeds a blanket of maggots and worms over which they run. These shades are the opportunists, those who in times of decision failed to take a stand for good or evil but followed only the path that might benefit them-

The inscription over Hell-gate, from Canto 3 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

selves. Among these are also the angels who refused to take a side during the rebellion of Lucifer. Dante recognizes several shades among these but names none of them. He does, however, identify one of these souls as he who made the “great denial”: This almost certainly refers to POPE CELESTINE V, who resigned the office of the papacy in order to enter a life of contemplation at the urging of the man who later succeeded him, POPE BONIFACE VIII. Without stopping to talk to any of these souls, Dante and Virgil advance to the river Acheron. The poets must cross this first of the rivers of the underworld to enter into Hell proper, so they join the crowd of newly dead souls waiting on the shore to be ferried across into the Inferno. The monstrous old boatman, Charon, arrives but notices Dante among the throng of souls and recognizes that he is a living man. Charon orders Dante to get away from the boat, but Virgil immediately demonstrates his authority and his value as guide by subduing Charon and convincing him that the will of God is behind Dante’s journey through the realms of the afterlife. Charon says no more and begins to ferry the poets across the river. But as they begin to cross, the earth shakes and a strong wind begins to howl. Dante swoons in fear and does not wake again until the poets have arrived on the far shore. When a thunderclap rouses Dante from his swoon, he realizes he has reached the far side of Acheron. Virgil now leads Dante into the first circle of the deep, funnel-shaped pit of Hell, a circle called Limbo. Here the shades suffer none of the physical torment Dante will witness in deeper circles, for they are not in fact sinners. These are the virtuous pagans and unchristened children, prevented from entering Heaven, according to orthodox medieval Christianity, solely by their lack of baptism. Their suffering is mental and spiritual: The souls live with the desire for Heaven but without hope. This is Virgil’s home. Dante asks whether anyone from this circle has ever been allowed to leave (aside from Virgil himself, now guiding the pilgrim), and Virgil relates how Jesus Christ, after his crucifixion, descended into Limbo and rescued the souls of Old Testament figures such as ADAM, Noah, Moses, and KING DAVID, whose salvation was based on an implicit faith in a Christ to come—an event known as the “Harrowing of Hell.”

Inferno As the poets walk toward a light shining in the darkness, they are met by a group of four figures— HOMER, HORACE (QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCIUS), OVID (PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO), and LUCAN (MARCUS ANNAEUS LUCANUS)—who join Virgil to form a group of the five greatest poets of classical antiquity. After a few steps they beckon to Dante to join them, and he becomes the sixth member of this exalted group. They continue to walk toward the source of the light: a magnificent castle with a moat and seven walls. This impressive structure represents the highest achievement possible for human reason unaided by divine revelation. It is a beautiful place, but it is still in Hell. Here Dante sees other great figures of antiquity: political figures such as Aeneas and GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR; philosophers such as PLATO, Socrates, and Aristotle; thinkers such as Euclid and Ptolemy. He also sees important figures of medieval Islam, such as Saladin, AVERRÖES, and Avicenna. In all Dante names 38 important historical or legendary figures but finally is led out of the castle and back into the darkness by Virgil. The poets must make haste to move through the remaining circles of Hell. Commentary The opening stanza or tercet of Canto 1 places the action of the entire Comedy in context. Alluding to the “threescore years and ten” (i.e., 70 years) allotted for the human life span according to the Psalms (90.10), Dante is saying that the events of the poem occurred when he was 35 years old—that is, in the year 1300. Placing the poem in the recent past allows Dante to put prophetic speeches into the mouths of his characters, whose position in the afterlife allows them to predict future events, since Dante is writing these verses after 1307. Significant, as well, is the poet’s use of the phrase “our life,” rather than “my life.” He thus includes the reader in his narration, implying that he is one of “us.” It seems that from the very beginning of the text, the narrator is not only a fictional representation of the poet Dante in the year 1300 but also a representative example of all of us—an Everyman figure with whom the reader is invited to identify as he makes his journey. Traditional Christian allegory of the European Middle Ages commonly used the Everyman figure

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as its central character. While the Comedy may be read on a literal level—the 35-year-old poet Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood one day in the year 1300—we are also invited to read it on an allegorical level, in which each character, object, or event in the poem has another level of meaning. The poem makes abstract spiritual concepts concrete. Thus when the narrator finds himself in the “dark wood” after straying off the “right path,” we are also to understand that Everyman—that is, any human being—finds himself in the dark state of sin and error after having wandered from the true moral course established by God. The sunlight at the top of the hill suggests the love and grace of God and foreshadows the Paradise Dante will enter in the last section of the poem. To describe the manner in which the narrator begins to climb the hill, Dante uses the first of what will amount to hundreds of epic similes (extended similes in which the figurative term is so elaborate as to eclipse the literal term) in the Comedy. In using these similes, Dante imitates the style of Virgil’s great epic, the Aeneid. In fact this first simile (ll. 22–27)—in which he compares himself climbing the hill and looking back to the dark valley to an exhausted swimmer who, having reached shore, looks back at the waves that nearly drowned him—may allude to Book 1 of the Aeneid, wherein Aeneas, saved from a storm at sea and standing on shore, climbs a rocky hill to look back at the water for a sight of any other Trojan ship. The significance of the three beasts that threaten the pilgrim on the hill has been much debated. It is clear that they are taken from the book of Jeremiah (5.6): “Therefore a lion from the forest shall kill them, a wolf from the desert shall destroy them. A leopard is watching against their cities; everyone who goes out of them shall be torn in pieces—because their transgressions are many, their apostasies are great” (New Revised Standard Version [NRSV]). Thus the beasts most clearly represent the forces of sin that prevent Everyman from reaching grace. It is more difficult, however, to assign more specific allegorical meaning to each beast. Early commentators saw them as representing lust (the she-wolf), pride (the lion), and avarice (the leopard), though it is difficult to see why

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Dante running from the three beasts is rescued by Virgil, from Canto 1 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

Dante would have chosen merely these three sins to highlight at this point. It seems more likely that the beasts prefigure the three major divisions of Hell that Virgil discusses in Canto 11 (ll. 16–111): Thus the she-wolf suggests the sins of incontinence and concupiscence that are punished in circles two through five of the Inferno; the lion symbolizes all types of violence, punished in circle seven; and the leopard symbolizes the sins of fraud, represented in its various forms, seen in circles eight and nine of Hell. These three categories of sin, and hence divisions of Hell, roughly correspond to Aristotle’s classification of sins in the Nicomachean Ethics, in which he distinguishes incontinence, malice, and bestiality (the last two suggesting “fraud” and “violence”). Why Dante should choose a classical organization for Hell rather than the conventional medieval Christian scheme of the seven deadly sins

is a puzzle. Perhaps because the sinners in Hell are outside the possibility of redemption, the categories of their sins are those recognized in the pagan classical world, rather than in the world of the saved. Dante’s Purgatory, where all of the souls are saved, is structured according to the Christian design of the seven deadly sins. The significance of Virgil himself is complex as well. He is, for Dante, the greatest of all classical authors, and his Aeneid the pinnacle of epic poetry. He refers to Virgil’s poem later as a “tragedy,” and his choice to call his own poem a “comedy” reflects his desire to create a work that rivaled Virgil’s in its epic scope but differed from it in its emphasis on the salvation of the individual soul rather than upon the destiny of the Roman nation. Besides, Book 6 of Virgil’s poem describes the visit of Aeneas to the underworld, so Virgil knows the way from earth

Inferno to Hell. In addition Virgil’s FOURTH ECLOGUE was interpreted by medieval Christians as containing a prophecy of the birth of Christ, so that Virgil could be seen by a medieval audience as a link between the ancient classical world and the medieval Christian one. Thus the shade of Virgil leads the pilgrim Dante through Hell and Purgatory, as the poet Virgil in a sense leads the poet Dante through the first two canticles of his poem. Allegorically as the composer of what Dante considered the greatest work of Western literary art, Virgil is usually seen as representing human Reason. But as a classical pagan Virgil is beyond Christian redemption—thus he mentions the “false gods” who were worshipped when he lived. As such he symbolizes the highest achievement a human being can reach without the aid of divine grace. Reason can lead the individual to recognize the nature of sin and to repudiate it, and this is essentially what Virgil will do for the Everyman Dante as he leads him through Hell and Purgatory. But he will be unable to take him into Paradise, since only through divine love and grace can one enter. Thus Beatrice will become Dante’s guide through the heavenly spheres. In addition to its Christian allegory, the Comedy contains a good deal of political commentary concerning the current situation in Italy, particularly in Dante’s home city of Florence, and the struggle between papal and Imperial claims to secular authority. The most obscure reference in the first Canto is Virgil’s prophecy of the greyhound (l. 95) that will destroy the she-wolf and, according to Virgil, restore broken Italy. Essentially this encapsulates Dante’s dream of a single world emperor, which he elaborates in DE MONARCHIA, a dream that he thought would lead to peace (as it did in Virgil’s own time under Augustus). Some have suggested that the greyhound represents the Holy Roman Emperor, HENRY VII OF LUXEMBOURG, who had become emperor in 1308, about the same time Dante was beginning work on De monarchia and was working on the early cantos of the Inferno. Another candidate has been the French prince CHARLES MARTEL d’Anjou. But Charles had died in 1295, so the prophecy would be senseless in 1300. The most likely historical figure corre-

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sponding to the greyhound is Dante’s friend and patron in his exile, CAN GRANDE DELLA SCALA, the emperor’s viceroy in Verona from 1308 to 1329. Virgil’s obscure description of the greyhound as being born “between Feltro and Feltro” seems to fit Can Grande, who was born in Verona, which lies between the cities of Feltro and Montefeltro. How Can Grande would rid the world of the sins of incontinence is obscure, unless Dante saw those sins—lust, gluttony, and greed—as particularly attached to the secular ambitions of the papacy. Dante’s hesitancy before following Vigil into Hell itself serves a structural function in this canticle and for the Comedy as a whole: It allows for a second beginning. Notice that the invocation to the Muses takes place here in Canto 2, not in Canto 1. There will be a parallel invocation in the first Canto of both the PURGATORIO and the PARADISO. Consider that the Purgatorio and the Paradiso have 33 cantos each, while the Inferno has 34 (for a total of 100 cantos altogether). Dante clearly considered Canto 2 the first canto of the Inferno proper, with Canto 1 serving as an introductory canto to the entire Comedy, rather than simply to the Inferno itself. Dante’s hesitancy serves a thematic function as well. Dante compares himself first to Aeneas and then to Saint Paul. The descent of Aeneas into Hades was, Dante says in line 27, a victory for Aeneas, for the Roman Empire, and for the papacy. This is a peculiarly medieval way of looking at the event: The Roman Empire made possible the spread of Christianity and the Roman Church. This sometimes strained coexistence of empire and papacy is, as mentioned earlier, the chief political theme of the Comedy. Further, as Aeneas in Hades received a prophecy of the political future from his father, Anchises, so Dante might expect to hear political prophecies in his visit to the afterlife. As for Saint Paul, he was caught up into Heaven in order to strengthen his faith (2 Corinthians 12.3) in order to help him convey God’s message to the world. Dante thus calls Paul the “chosen vessel.” The implication may be that Dante himself, a new “chosen vessel,” is destined through his Comedy to spread his faith through the world. The three women who play such a substantial role in Canto 2 are, first, the counterparts of the

34 Inferno three beasts of Canto 1, balancing those symbols of human sin with symbols of God’s grace. The Virgin Mary, traditional symbol of Divine Mercy, first takes pity on Dante and sends Saint Lucy (or Lucia), whose name means “light” and who is generally seen as the figure of “illuminating grace” in the poem—the grace that, in traditional medieval theology first directs the intellect toward salvation. To achieve this in Dante, Lucy sends Beatrice. Beatrice, whose name means “bringer of blessings,” suggests in this particular canto Divine Wisdom (especially in her reclining position beside the contemplative Rachel), but in general and most often through the Comedy, as Dante’s beloved, seems to symbolize perfect divine love. Since Dante’s Beatrice lived 1300 years after the Roman poet, it is somewhat surprising that Virgil actually recognizes her when she visits him in Limbo. But the manner in which he addresses Beatrice (in lines 75ff.) suggests that he recognizes not her historical identity but her allegorical significance. She is, he says, the being through whom mankind is able to rise above the limits of mortality. These limits are imposed on us by the goddess Fortuna, who governs all the changeable world beneath the moon. It has been suggested that Beatrice therefore represents Lady Philosophy as pictured in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. But that seems inconsistent: If Virgil, as Human Reason, cannot conduct Dante beyond Purgatory, how can Philosophy do so? It could be that Virgil understands Beatrice according to the limits of his own classical paganism, wherein through meditation one could transcend the world of change and enter the realm of permanence. Beatrice, after all, descended to him from the side of Rachel, who commentators agree is a symbol of the contemplative life. But surely Dante’s readers are not meant to be limited by Virgil’s vision and should rather see Beatrice as the Christian symbol of Divine Love that Dante makes her throughout the Comedy. Canto 3 introduces the pilgrim to the first group of sinners in Hell—men and women who lived their lives without honor or without reproach, because they never took a stand. Thus they are denied a place in Heaven, but even Hell will not receive them, so they will spend eternity in Hell’s vestibule.

Appropriately neither Dante nor Virgil speaks the name of any of the souls in the vestibule: They did nothing in their lives, good or bad, that would cause their names to be remembered. This canto also introduces the principle of punishment in Dante’s Hell. In what he later refers to as contrapasso (Canto 27, l. 142), Dante imagines for every sin a punishment appropriate to the crime. Retribution in Dante’s Hell requires either that the sinners eternally repeat their sin in some symbolic form, or, in some cases, that they be eternally reminded of the sin by engaging in behavior that directly contrasts with their sin. In this case the sinners who never followed any real goal or leader in their lives must eternally chase a meaningless and constantly shifting banner. The sinners who felt no goad to action in their lives are continually stung by pursuing wasps and hornets. This idea of contrapasso goes further, however. Dante intended his allegory to be interpreted on four levels, one of which is the personal moral level. What the system of contrapasso suggests on a moral level is that sin and Hell are identical. Dante implies that insofar as sin separates us from the love of God, sin itself is the moral equivalent of being in Hell. It also suggests that since sin is a choice willed by an individual, Hell itself is simply the eternal confirmation and fulfillment of that same choice. Canto 4 completes Dante’s preparation for his plunge into the true torments of Hell by giving him a slight respite among the great figures (historical and legendary) of antiquity. Christian tradition held that Limbo—a place without torment but eternally separated from God—had been prepared for the spirits of virtuous Old Testament figures born before the advent of Christ, and for the souls of unbaptized infants born after Christ’s resurrection. Since in the church’s view, Christ’s Harrowing of Hell had set free the Old Testament patriarchs and matriarchs, there should be only unbaptized children in Limbo when the pilgrim arrives. Dante has altered tradition by peopling Limbo with virtuous pagans of classical Greece and Rome (and even a few contemporary Muslims), seeing no reason to consign them to the anguish of Hell. The orthodox Christian view, of course, held that “extra ecclesiam nulla salus” (outside the

Inferno church, there is no salvation), so Dante could not place the Homers and Aristotles in Paradise. And although a few later 14th-century writers (Julian of Norwich and William Langland, for example) suggested that God might ultimately save even pagans, Dante was somewhat radical even in consigning them to Limbo. While Limbo is not a happy place, because it lacks the hope of ultimate salvation, its inhabitants live in a sedate environment where they can converse about ideas with the other virtuous souls. Limbo is pictured very like the classical Elysian fields in which Aeneas conversed with the shade of his father, Anchises, in Virgil’s epic. The scene in which the five great poets of antiquity accept Dante as the sixth among their number seems by most measures to be pure egotistical selfaggrandizing. Modern readers generally feel that even if Dante’s self-praise is accurate, he ought to be more modest about it (as, for example, is Chaucer at the end of Troilus and Criseyde when he kisses the footsteps of the great poets, such as Virgil and Homer, who preceded him). In fact before the circulation of the Inferno itself (that is, at the time this journey is said to be taking place), few would have considered Dante worthy of such high praise. But part of the purpose of Dante’s gesture here is to indicate his conception of the role of poet that he was trying to fill, and the significance of the Comedy itself as Dante was conceiving it. In another sense Dante’s identification of himself with the great classical poets may not be complimentary at all. They are in Hell, remember. It is a very nice corner of Hell, but it is Hell nonetheless. Dante consistently sympathizes with, admires, or identifies with some of the figures he meets in the Inferno. This is a way of recognizing the sin in himself. On the moral level the journey through Hell is like the first step of Christian penance: In order to expiate the sin (which will occur in Purgatory), one must first recognize it. Dante, as the Everyman figure of the Comedy, ultimately recognizes it. One final aspect of the fourth canto that has caused some scholarly debate is the allegory of the castle itself. The most likely interpretation is that it represents philosophy, the learned pursuit of wisdom without the aid of revelation. The seven walls may suggest the four moral virtues (prudence,

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justice, fortitude, and temperance) and three speculative virtues (wisdom, science, and understanding)—that is, virtues not necessarily connected with the Christian faith. The seven portals into the castle most likely denote the seven liberal arts studied in medieval universities (the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium—geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music). The castle’s light of human philosophy is bright and impressive indeed, but without faith or revelation it shines only in an eternity of darkness.

SINS OF INCONTINENCE (THE SHE-WOLF) (CANTOS 5–7) Synopsis Virgil leads Dante from Limbo down toward the second circle of Hell, where the true punishments begin. In their way sits Minos, the mythological figure who was so just in life that the gods made him judge of the dead. He has that role in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, but Dante depicts Minos as half-human, half-beast. As sinners approach him, Minos assigns them to the circle where they are to spend eternity, according to the number of times he wraps his tail around himself. When Dante approaches, Minos accosts him, warning him to be careful about whom he trusts. Virgil steps in once more, admonishing Minos not to hinder what has been willed on high. The poets pass into the second circle, the first of a series of rounds dealing with sins of appetite and lack of control—the kinds of sins represented by the she-wolf in Canto 1. As the poets stand on a ledge looking into circle two, they see thousands of shades being blown about wildly by a raging whirlwind. These are the souls of the lustful, who in life were driven by their own passions. From their vantage point Virgil points out to Dante the souls of Aeneas’s lover DIDO, Helen of Troy and her lover Paris, ACHILLES and Semiramis, and the great lover of medieval courtly romance, Tristan. When they see a pair of lovers clinging together, Dante desires to speak with them. At Virgil’s suggestion Dante calls to them in the name of their love, and they approach to hover close by the poet. They are FRANCESCA DA RIMINI of RAVENNA and her lover, her brother-in-law Paolo da Rimini.

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Inferno

While Paolo weeps upon her shoulder, Francesca tells Dante their story: Their desire for one another was whetted by their reading a romance of Lancelot and Guinevere aloud. When they reached the point where Lancelot kisses Guinevere, they were overcome by their passion and, as Francesca says, “that day we read no more.” The two lovers died together, murdered by Francesca’s husband, who, she tells the poet, is damned to Caina, the ninth circle of the Inferno, which houses the murderers of kinsmen. At this point overcome by pity for Francesca, Dante swoons again. Dante awakens from his swoon to find himself in the third circle. Here a putrid freezing rain and filthy snow fall incessantly, covering the ground with a fetid slush, while a horrible stench fills the air. The poets’ way is blocked by the guardian of this circle, the three-headed dog Cerberus, who

in classical mythology was warden of the entire underworld. The ravenous dog threatens them, but Virgil distracts him by throwing handfuls of the disgusting slush at him. The poets slip past the beast and find themselves moving among the souls of the gluttons: Those who wasted their lives on food and drink now wallow eternally in the foul slime of this circle, pelted by the stinking rain and torn randomly by the rapacious Cerberus. As the poets pass by, one of the shades rises from the slush and addresses Dante. Though Dante does not recognize him because his features are so changed by his sin and its punishment, he identifies himself as the Florentine CIACCO—a name that means “the hog.” Ciacco is eager to hear news of Florence. As the writer Dante imagines it, the damned all have knowledge of the past and foreknowledge of the future but have no knowledge of

Cerebus, from Canto 6 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

Inferno present events in the living world. At the pilgrim’s urging Ciacco pronounces the first of what will be several political prophecies in the Inferno. He tells Dante that the White party will soon drive the Blacks from Florence, but that within three years the Blacks will return, with the aid of one who currently has not chosen sides. The Blacks will hold sway for a long time, Ciacco says, and although there are two just men in the city, no one listens to them. Dante asks Ciacco about five other prominent Florentines of the past whom he considered worthy but is told that they are all deeper down in Hell. As Dante parts from him, Ciacco requests that Dante remember his name when he returns to the world of the living. As the poets move on, Dante asks Virgil about the Last Judgment. Will the punishments of the damned be worsened or lessened when they are reunited with their bodies? Virgil refers Dante to Aristotle, suggesting that when creation is perfected after the Last Judgment, then the punishment of the damned will be perfected as well—thus the suffering will intensify for the souls in Hell, while heavenly bliss will intensify for those in Paradise. While they speak, the poets approach the edge of the next circle. As the poets approach to the fourth circle, they are accosted by Plutus, the pagan god of wealth, who is guardian of this round. Plutus, imagined by Dante as a bestial demon, menaces the pilgrims in a bizarre, inarticulate gibberish. But as he had with Charon and Minos, Virgil quiets Plutus by declaring that this journey was willed on high, and the demon collapses. As they enter the circle, Virgil and Dante witness what seems to be a raging battle, as two mobs of shouting sinners push great boulder-sized weights against one another, clashing together again and again. These opposing groups, Virgil explains, are made up of the misers on one side and the wasters on the other. Both groups in their own way valued money inordinately above all other things and in death are burdened by the kind of meaningless dead weight to which they were excessively devoted in life. In their incessant struggle the adherents of each extreme serve to punish the other. When Dante tries in vain to recognize anyone among the crowd of sinners, Virgil explains

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that most of the souls in this round are priests, bishops, or other corrupt members of the clergy, but that the intensity of their sins and punishment has made them unrecognizable. Dante now asks Virgil to explain the role of FORTUNE, whose goods both sets of sinners in this round coveted so highly. The figure of Fortune was often depicted—as in Boethius’s influential Consolation of Philosophy—as a pagan deity who, through her randomly spinning wheel, allotted her gifts (wealth, power, fame) haphazardly among human beings. But according to Virgil, Fortune serves a rational function within God’s universal providence. Virgil describes Fortune’s role in the redistribution of wealth among nations and families as a divinely ordained office. It is now past midnight on Good Friday, so the poets have been traveling for some six hours and so move on more quickly. They arrive at the River Styx, pictured as a dark swamp. The river itself is the fifth circle of Hell, and as the poets walk around it they witness a crowd of shades mired in the marshy slime, violently attacking one another. These are the souls of the wrathful. Virgil also draws Dante’s attention to bubbles rising through the muddy bog. These, he tells the pilgrim, emerge from the souls of the sullen, who lie completely submerged beneath the sludge. The bubbles leave their mouths as they burble an unintelligible, hopeless parody of a hymn. Having skirted the swamp, the poets reach the foot of a high tower, a part of the walls surrounding the infernal city of Dis. They have completed their journey through Upper Hell. Commentary The contrapasso of circle two is fairly clear: In life the lustful were caught up and swept away by their own passions, so in death they are buffeted eternally by these strong infernal winds. Dante himself, author of numerous poems extolling love—and the faithful (though unrequited) lover of Beatrice, another man’s wife—may have been particularly aware of the intricacies of this particular sin, though Dante probably would have distinguished between his own noble love for Beatrice and the kind of unbridled lust represented by the debauched Assyrian empress

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Semiramis described in this canto. Still the character of the pilgrim Dante expresses profound pity for the lovers’ shades in circle two (ll. 70–72), and immediately afterward he speaks to the souls of Paolo and Francesca. The story of these two lovers is probably the best known tale in the Divine Comedy, and as the pilgrim Dante does, most readers find it the most sympathetic story in the Inferno. After Dante’s introduction of the lovers into European literature, the two became legendary, so much so that, for example, there are 42 novels in German alone dealing with their romance. According to legend, the handsome Paolo was sent to arrange a marriage between Francesca and his crippled brother, Giovanni Malatesta of Rimini (known as Giovanni the Lame). Thinking the emissary was the proposed husband, Francesca fell in love with Paolo at first sight. When he became aware of their affair, Giovanni sought to kill Paolo by a sword thrust that went through Paolo’s body and killed Francesca as well. The grieving Giovanni buried them in the same tomb. That was the legend. In fact Giovanni (who was somewhat deformed but a valiant soldier) made a political marriage to Francesca, daughter of Guido da Polenta of Ravenna, in 1275. She became enamored of her husband’s younger brother, Paolo, after moving to Rimini, though in 1275 the 40-yearold Paolo was married and had two children. The affair was carried on for several years, and when Giovanni burst into their bedroom and killed both of them around 1285, Francesca also had a nineyear-old daughter. Francesca’s story so moves the pilgrim Dante that he swoons. She begins by describing her love in conventional medieval fashion, speaking of how love takes form in the “gentle heart” (l. 100) (she thus uses terms Dante himself had used in his love poetry, borrowed from the famous canzone “The Gentle Heart” by GUIDO GUINIZELLI). She describes this love as irresistible, but when Dante questions her further, she reveals that she and Paolo were inspired to consummate their love while reading an Arthurian romance, a book that she describes as a “Galeotto,” referring to the character GALLEHOT (Gallehault), who in the romance encourages Lancelot and Guinevere’s love. Francesca also

suggests that the greater fault was her husband’s, announcing that “Caina” waits for him—that is, the circle reserved for those who are treacherous to their kinsmen (it still awaits because Giovanni was still alive in 1300, the fictional date of the Comedy). Despite her enticing words and the pilgrim’s pity for her, it would be a mistake to accept Francesca’s story at face value. Remember she is in Hell—to pity her is to question divine justice. Remember, too, that Minos tells Dante at the beginning of this Canto to be careful whom he trusts. Dante the pilgrim is making this journey so that he can recognize and reject sin, both of which he fails to do in Francesca’s case. Her story consistently shifts blame away from herself: first to the irresistible power of love, then to the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, then to her own husband. Never does she take responsibility, never does she express regret for the sin (only for being caught in it), and never does she repent. Like all other sinners in the Inferno, she is in Hell through her own will and actions. The fact that she and Paolo are inseparable has led some romantic readers to assume that their love has kept them together in spite of death and Hell. But in fact when Francesca refers to Paolo as “this one” and mentions that he will never be parted from her, it is more an expression of her annoyance than her love. Paolo himself never ceases weeping. The fact is that their togetherness is a part of their torment—they can never be free of the object of their sin. Dante’s swoon at the end of this canto reveals only that he has a good deal to learn. In Canto 6 the significance of the gluttons’ symbolic punishment is fairly easy to see. As the sinners went through life wallowing in food and drink and creating nothing but garbage and filth, so for eternity they wallow in the filth they created. Like those of animals, their appetites overshadowed their reason in life, so here in Hell they cry out like dogs as the monstrous Cerberus drools over them. Still the pilgrim Dante, having learned nothing from his mistaken sympathy in the previous canto, feels pity for the sinners he sees. Dante’s failure to discard his earthly view is suggested again in this canto when he names the five Florentine politicians whom he considers “righteous”: these are FARINATA DEGLI

Inferno

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The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini (“The Whirlwind of Lovers”), from Canto 5 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National ArtCollections Fund, 1922.

UBERTI, TEGGHIAIO ALDOBRANDI, JACOPO RUSTICUCCI, MOSCA DE’ LAMBERTI, and “Arrigo.” All are lower down in Hell, he learns from Ciacco. Dante will meet Farinata in the circle of heretics in Canto 10, Tegghiaio and Jacopo among the Sodomites in Canto 16, and Mosca even deeper among the sowers of discord in Canto 28. Arrigo is never mentioned again, but Dante’s judgment is certainly called into question by his inquiry after these figures. The question of the special foreknowledge of the damned is raised by Ciacco’s political prophecy in this canto. Because the damned exist in eternity, they can see the future from this extraordinary vantage point, just as they can see the past. They cannot, however, see the present; that is why Ciacco must ask Dante for news of Florence. His prediction, like all the predictions of the damned, is com-

pletely accurate: On May 1, 1300, just a few weeks after the Easter weekend during which the Comedy is set, the White GUELPHs of Florence drove out the Blacks in a bloody confrontation. But less than two years later, in 1302, the Blacks were returned to power with the aid of Pope Boniface VIII, and that same year they sent into exile most of the prominent members of the White party, Dante included. Who the two honest men mentioned by Ciacco are is unknown, though many scholars believe Dante intended to refer to himself as one of them. Since Dante is writing the Inferno at least seven years after the fictional time of the story, he is able to have his characters predict future events with complete accuracy. One more comment should be made about Ciacco’s desire to be remembered on earth. Many

40 Inferno of the sinners here in Upper Hell express similar desires, since their memory is in a sense the only positive form of immortality available to them. Deeper down in Hell, however, sinners only want to be forgotten, since their deeds on earth can only make their names reviled among the living. In Canto 7 Dante begins by presenting the inarticulate speech of Plutus, whose inward rage makes him babble incoherently at the poets when they arrive in circle four and whose bloated importance collapses like an empty bag of wind when Virgil confronts him, a collapse that seems to represent the ultimate emptiness of Fortune’s gifts from the vantage point of eternity. The gurgling hymn of the sullen shades of circle five rounds off the canto by returning to the theme of inarticulate speech introduced in the beginning. It seems that speech, the means by which human beings communicate in society, is impossible for the shades of this circle, obsessed as they are with outward wealth or with inward wrath. They cannot communicate with one another; nor does Dante communicate with any of the shades in this realm. The allegory of the heavy weights, symbolic of worldly possessions, is obvious and a fitting punishment for the misers as well as the wasters, since both groups are in Hell because they misused and overvalued the gifts of Fortune. The medieval Fortune was always depicted with a wheel, a wheel at whose turning the goods of Fortune were redistributed. The misers and the wasters of Canto 7 roll their boulders at one another, then turn around and roll them the other way until they meet again. It has been suggested that in this way each group traverses a semicircle, essentially completing an entire broken circle together—completing, that is, a turn of Fortune’s wheel each time they push their weights against one another. Thus a part of their punishment is to complete the turn of the wheel that they tried to stop or circumvent during their lives on Earth. Dante deals with another contrasting pair of sins (wrath and sullenness) in circle five. Specifically why Dante put this second pair together in the swampy Styx is less clear. Some have suggested that the “sullen” who lie beneath the surface of the swamp represent those guilty of the sin of sloth; thus circle five punishes two of the seven deadly

sins—wrath and sloth. Most commentators, however, point to a distinction made by Aristotle and by SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS, both of whom describe three types of wrath: There are the “choleric” who act out their anger violently (whom Aquinas called acuti), the “ill-tempered” who are vindictively wrathful (the difficiles), and the “bitter” who sullenly keep their wrath buried inside (the amari). It seems likely that the souls on the surface of the Styx who viciously battle one another represent the acuti, reenacting their antisocial behavior here in Hell. Those who lie submerged at the bottom of the swamp most likely represent the amari, who, as they hid their angry feelings in life, are now hidden completely in the swamp. As the sinners in circle four represented two contrasting aspects of the same sin—those who hoard or waste the gifts of Fortune—so the groups of sinners in circle five represent contrasting aspects of the sin of wrath—those who bottle up and those who extravagantly exhibit their angry emotions. This parallels the hoarders and wasters of wealth and may explain the grouping of circles four and five in this canto. As he reaches the border of Upper Hell, Dante displays a new reaction to the sinners that he sees. No longer overcome by pity for their punishments, as he was with Francesca and Ciacco, here the pilgrim has a more objective interest in the infernal shades. In part this may be due to the lack of communication, and by extension the lack of communal bonding, with the sinners in this canto. It may also suggest that Dante has learned something after his reactions in the previous two cantos, though in fact he will again have feelings of pity (and will need to be rebuked by Virgil for them) deeper down in Hell.

WALLS OF DIS AND THE HERETICS (CANTOS 8–11) Synopsis Before the poets reach the foot of the high tower on the edge of Hell’s fifth circle, Dante notices a mysterious flame on the peak of the tower. This signal is instantly answered from the darkness on the other side of the Styx, and immediately the poets are approached by the boatman Phlegyas, speeding toward them like an arrow. Phlegyas, legendary

Inferno    41 king of Greek Boeotia who burned down Apollo’s temple in a fit of rage, is here made the guardian of Dante’s circle of the wrathful. Fittingly he is overcome by anger when he finds that he must transport a living soul across the Styx, but Virgil is once again successful in persuading the reluctant infernal guardian to give them passage in his boat. As the poets cross the muddy waters, one of the wrathful souls rears up and accosts the pilgrims. Though the shade is covered with slime, Dante recognizes him as the Florentine Filippo Argenti, a haughty Black Guelph who according to legend once slapped the poet Dante in public out of anger. Seeing him here, the pilgrim addresses angry words at him, and when Filippo tries to grab hold of Phlegyas’s boat, Virgil pushes Filippo away. When Dante actually expresses a wish to see Filippo tormented even further, Virgil approves of Dante’s righteous anger and, in words recalling Luke’s gospel, blesses the womb that bore him. Meanwhile Filippo, thrown back from the boat, is savagely attacked and torn apart by the other sinners in the swamp. The boat now approaches the walls and red towers of the great city of Dis, capital of the Inferno and site of Hell’s lower circles. They reach the shore and are left before the iron gate, the only way into the city. It is guarded by a force of fallen angels. Here for the first time Virgil is stymied. He is unable to convince the rebel angels to do the will of God, and they slam the gate against him and Dante. The canto ends with Dante stunned and fearful, and a shaken but reassuring Virgil anxiously awaiting help from Heaven for which he has prayed. As Canto 9 opens, Dante is pale with fear, and when Virgil himself appears nervous and uncertain, Dante tactfully asks him whether anyone from Limbo, Virgil’s home in Hell’s first circle, has ever before ventured this deep into the Inferno. Virgil answers that he himself has: Soon after his death a witch named Elechtho restored him to his human shape and forced him to journey down to the very bottom of Hell to take back a sinner from that circle. Thus Virgil reassures Dante that he knows his way through this realm. But new terrors arise at that point: The three classical Furies appear on the city wall, pictured as creatures part woman, part reptile. They scream and tear at their breasts

when they see Dante, and they call forth the gorgon Medusa to turn him to stone. Virgil, warning Dante not to look directly into Medusa’s face, forces the poet to turn his back to the tower and for good measure stands behind Dante, covering the poet’s eyes with his hands. In a direct address to the reader, Dante the poet here reminds his audience that they must interpret these events allegorically. Suddenly a great noise frightens the Furies away and scatters the entire host of fallen angels. As Virgil and Dante turn in the direction of the blast, they see a heavenly messenger arrive in answer to Virgil’s prayer. The angel moves effortlessly through Hell, scattering all of the damned souls in his path and walking across the water of the Styx as if it were dry land. The angel encounters no resistance as, with a wave of a small wand, he opens the gates of Dis to allow the pilgrims to enter, and

The Styx—Philippo Argenti, from Canto 8 of the Inferno, by Gustave Doré. From Dante’s Inferno, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and Illustrated with the Designs of M. Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1885.

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Farinata, from Canto 10 of the Inferno, by Gustave Doré. From Dante’s Inferno, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and Illustrated with the Designs of M. Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1885.

before returning to Heaven by the same path, he chastises the rebel angels for their continued defiance of God’s will. The poets now enter the infernal city, coming immediately upon Hell’s sixth circle. Here are innumerable open sarcophagi, all burning with redhot flames, from which Dante can hear cries of pain and torment. Here, Virgil explains, are entombed the souls of the archheretics and all of their followers, whom Dante will encounter in Canto 10. Dante and Virgil converse as they move through the tombs of the Epicurean heretics, when suddenly they are interrupted by a voice calling from inside one of the sepulchers. The shade has recognized Dante’s accent as Tuscan, and as he stands up Virgil identifies him as Farinata degli Uberti, a great captain of the Tuscan Ghibellines at the bloody battle of Montaperti in 1260. In his proud bearing Farinata seems to disdain Hell itself, and when

he learns Dante’s lineage he recognizes the poet as a Guelph enemy. Dante responds to Farinata’s scorn by asserting that the Guelphs have learned to recover from defeat (as they had in 1266, two years after Farinata’s death), something the Ghibellines have failed to do. But as they speak they are interrupted by another shade who rises from the same tomb. This is Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, whose daughter had married Farinata’s son. Cavalcante is the father of Dante’s friend and fellow poet Guido Cavalcanti and has interrupted to ask, if it is the gift of genius that enables Dante to travel alive through the underworld, why his son Guido has not traveled there with Dante. Dante suggests that the reason may be that Guido lacked the proper respect for Dante’s guide (presumably Virgil, though since the “guide” mentioned is unnamed, Dante could be referring to Beatrice or even to God himself). Here Cavalcante, inferring from Dante’s use of the past tense that Guido is dead, swoons back into the flaming tomb. At this point Farinata—disdainful of all the souls around him—picks up the political conversation at the precise point where Cavalcante has interrupted it. The Ghibelline captain wants to know why the Guelphs had been so adamant in keeping his fellow Ghibellines in exile, and Dante responds that the brutality of Montaperti, in which 4,000 Florentine Guelphs were slaughtered in a single day, may be the cause. Farinata defends his political acts, reminding Dante that he alone of the Ghibelline leaders prevented them from razing Florence to the ground after Montaperti. (This is the first time in the Comedy that the name Florence occurs.) Then Farinata pronounces a prophecy, as his fellow Florentine Ciacco had: Dante himself will come to know the bitterness of exile, he claims, within 50 moons. Farinata’s prophecy stirs Dante to ask why the damned are able to see the future so well but seem to know nothing about the present—as Cavalcante did not know his son was still alive, and Farinata did not know the Guelphs now controlled Florence. Farinata tells Dante that this is actually a part of the punishment of the damned: They can see only distant things, so that when Farinata’s tomb is sealed forever on Judgment Day, the end of time, he will know nothing at all.

Inferno Virgil calls Dante to leave, but before he does he leaves word with Farinata to tell Cavalcante that Guido is still alive, and it was only his confusion about the shade’s inability to know the present that had prevented him from assuaging the father’s fears. Now moving more quickly through the sixth circle, Dante expresses his anxiety about his coming exile, but Virgil comforts him, saying all will be made clear when they appear before Beatrice. After the drama of Canto 10 one of the most prosaic cantos of the Inferno follows. In Canto 11 the poets stop at the edge of the cliff that separates circle six from circle seven and look down into the abyss, where they can see the three smaller—and deeper— circles: the seventh, eighth, and ninth. The stench that rises from Lower Hell is overpowering, however, so they stop for a moment to allow their senses to become accustomed to the smell before moving on. As it happens, they have stopped to rest at the tomb of POPE ANASTASIUS II (496–98), reputed in medieval times to have been beguiled by the deacon Photinus away from his faith in Christ’s divinity. So as not to waste time while their progress is delayed, Virgil takes the opportunity to instruct Dante on the hierarchy of punishments in Lower Hell. Drawing largely on Aristotle’s Ethics, supplemented by his Physics and the Bible, Virgil’s description of Hell essentially reflects the earlier division of sins among the she-wolf, the lion, and the leopard. The three lower circles, Virgil explains, punish the sins of malice, which include both violence (the lion) and fraud (the leopard). Circle seven is subdivided into three rounds, which punish, in turn, sins of violence against one’s neighbor, against oneself, and against God—the latter comprising sins directly against God (blasphemy); against God’s child, Nature (sodomy); and against Nature’s child, Art, or, more specifically, against human industry (usury). The sins of fraud, since they are directly opposed to love, are those most severely punished by God and so are reserved for the deepest circles of Hell. Fraud is divided into two types: fraud against those with whom one has no special connection—sins punished in the 10 bolgias or “pockets” of circle eight—and treacherous fraud against one’s family, country, hosts, or guests, and benefactors—these are punished in the bottom of Hell in circle nine.

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Dante wants to know how the sinners in the first six circles fit into this pattern. Virgil somewhat testily refers Dante to Aristotle’s Ethics, a text the pilgrim seems to have forgotten. He explains that these sins of incontinence, because they are the result of the weakness of human will rather than cold-blooded calculation, offend God less than those punished in Lower Hell, within the walls of Dis. Not yet content, Dante the citizen of Florence—city of burgeoning capitalism—wants to know why usury is considered a sin. Virgil, drawing on both Aristotle and the Bible, explains that making money in the form of interest is a violation of God’s law that human beings should live by their own industry. At this point having rested enough, and somehow aware of the movement of the stars that indicates it is now 3:00 A.M. Holy Saturday,

The Stygian Lake with the angry sinners fighting, from Canto 7 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

44 Inferno Virgil urges Dante onward, and the poets move toward the seventh circle and the sins of violence. Commentary In the first part of Canto 8 Dante’s use of Phlegyas as guardian of circle five is curious. Dante is the first to portray him in this role: Previous classical authors, such as Virgil, had described his torments in the deepest part of Tartarus. According to myth Apollo had raped Phlegyas’s daughter, Cononis, and in retaliation the enraged Phlegyas had burned down the god’s temple. Dante sees Phlegyas as a personification of rage itself, and therefore an appropriate guardian for the fifth circle. More dramatic, and more disturbing, is the poets’ encounter with Filippo Argenti. Filippo had been a Black Guelph and therefore opposed to Dante’s party and had apparently publicly struck Dante the poet. Furthermore Filippo’s brother seems to have received Dante’s property after the poet’s exile from Florence. Thus it is possible that Dante is simply taking this opportunity to vent his own anger at a political and personal enemy. But it seems likely there is far more in this exchange than this personal motive. Dante the pilgrim, who had fainted with sympathy for Francesca and had even pitied the gluttonous Ciacco, here directs an angry outburst against the haughty Filipo and even expresses a desire to see him more severely punished. More puzzling is Virgil’s reaction to Dante’s anger, alluding as it does to Elizabeth’s words in praise of Christ, the fruit of Mary’s womb. What may explain Virgil’s reaction is his recognition of spiritual growth by the pilgrim: Dante so far has been blinded to the nature of sin by sympathizing with the sinners. Filippo is one sinner for whom Dante feels no sympathy. The reader probably must trust Virgil at this point and assume that the guide has sensed a righteous anger in the pilgrim, so that Virgil here commends Dante not for any petty personal bitterness but for chastising of the sin of wrath itself. From this point on Dante expresses sympathy for individual sinners much less frequently. At the same time Dante the pilgrim here himself participates in the sin of wrath. On the moral level the journey through Hell is the

recognition of sin—not only of its nature but of the sins within oneself. Here the pilgrim demonstrates his own wrath. The poets are about to enter Lower Hell, where the sins are more severe and where it is appropriate that Dante have no sympathy. Lower Hell is beyond the walls of Dis, a city described in line 67 as containing buildings shaped like mosques. Thus Dante relates Lower Hell to the Muslim world, a conventional Christian association reflecting the enmity of late medieval crusades. Here in Dis the sins of violence, fraud, and malice are punished—the sins symbolized by the lion and the leopard. The walls of Dis are guarded not by individual classical figures but by an entire legion of fallen angels—beings of great power and malice. Virgil is ineffective before these malevolent beings. Perhaps this is because the poets are about to enter a realm of more profound evil than they have yet encountered, the kind of irrational malevolence that Virgil, as allegorical symbol of human reason, cannot overcome. Or perhaps these fallen angels, in Hell for rebelling directly against God himself, will never of their own accord submit to God’s will (in the way that the lesser guardians above yielded to Virgil’s evocation of that will that lay behind Dante’s journey). In any case Virgil has asked for divine help, which the poets await as the canto ends. In line 94 of Canto 8 Dante directly addresses his readers for the first time in the Comedy. He will do this 15 more times throughout the poem. Here he asks the reader to consider his alarm at the rebel angels’ demand that he return through Upper Hell on his own. These direct comments to the reader are remarkable in helping to establish a kind of intimacy between the character/narrator of the pilgrim Dante and his readers, as he consistently asks his audience to consider his emotional state at various points in the journey. The exchange between Virgil and Dante at the beginning of Canto 9 suggests, allegorically, that human reason is limited in its ability to deal with evil, and that there are occasions when only divine aid in the form of grace can help. Perhaps one of these situations is suggested by the Furies, who assail the pilgrim from the walls of Dis. They are the traditional classical avengers of the most hei-

Inferno nous crimes, those that involved the violation of society’s most basic taboos (such as matricide, for which they mercilessly pursue Orestes in Aeschylus’s Orestia). Thus the Furies, a kind of infernal counterpart to the three ladies of grace in Canto 2 (Mary, Lucy, Beatrice), allegorically represent the remorse of a guilty conscience. The most striking aspect of Canto 9, however, is Dante the poet’s direct address in lines 61–63 to the reader to pay careful attention to the poet’s true meaning lying behind the veil of his allegory. Commentators are divided as to whether this passage refers to the incident that has just occurred (in which the Gorgon Medusa has been summoned and Virgil forces Dante to hide his eyes from her gaze), or to the events that follow (the descent of the heavenly messenger and his opening of the gates of Dis). It is not impossible that the passage refers to both, since both events have profound allegorical significance. Medusa, who turns all who look upon her to stone, is summoned by the Furies of remorse. She may therefore represent the sin of despair, the despair of God’s grace that would preclude one’s receiving of it. Thus just as Medusa would turn the pilgrim Dante to stone and strand him forever in Hell, so despair would harden the heart of the pilgrim Everyman and take away the possibility of his accepting Grace—thus causing his eternal damnation. The allegory of this scene is particularly important for the spiritual lives of Dante’s readers. But if the address to the reader refers to the following scene, it may be calling attention to a significant structural pattern in the Comedy. As Mark Musa has pointed out, the descent of the angel here parallels the daily descent of two angels to the gates of Purgatory in the Purgatorio, Canto 8 (note that, since the Inferno’s first canto is an introduction to the entire Comedy, Canto 9 is actually the eighth canto of the Inferno proper). According to Musa these two descents, plus Beatrice’s descent to the top of Mount Purgatory at the end of the Purgatorio, allegorically represent the “three advents of Christ” as described in Saint Bernard’s “Sermons on the Advents.” Bernard describes Christ’s first advent as his Harrowing of Hell, his second as the daily advent into the hearts of Christians, and the

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third as the Last Judgment. In this way the journey of the pilgrim Everyman encompasses all of Christian time and, in fact, as the inclusion of classical figures suggests, pre-Christian times as well. Thus the Comedy represents the journey of all human beings toward God. The descent of the angel into Hell suggests, allegorically, Christ’s descent into Limbo to save the patriarchs and virtuous souls who lived prior to his incarnation. In the same way the heavenly messenger arrives to free Dante, the innocent Everyman figure, from his entrapment and allow him to continue his journey. Canto 9 ends with the vast cemetery of the heretics. For Dante the term heretic referred more narrowly to those who would deny the immortality of the soul. These sinners are suffering within burning tombs that stand open. On the Day of Judgment, however, their tombs will be covered and sealed for eternity. Thus the contrapasso of this canto suggests that as these sinners refused to believe in the eternal life of the soul, their own souls would suffer the same fate as their bodies—they would be sealed forever in their burial vaults. The circle of heretics lies somewhat outside the general structure of Hell, since the heretics do not fit neatly into the threefold division of sins into those of incontinence, violence, and fraud. The heretics stand at the edge of Lower Hell, as the virtuous pagans of circle one stand on the brink of Upper Hell. Both are outside the general hierarchy of sins: The souls in Limbo are there because they did not know God; the souls in circle six are there because they denied God’s existence. Thus each group in its own way represents a form of spiritual blindness. It may be worth noting that the poets bear to the right at the end of Canto 9 (as opposed to their usual leftward motion). This happens at only one other point in the Inferno—in Canto 17 as they enter the circle of fraud. No commentator has convincingly explained why this occurs, though perhaps it is only to draw our attention to a major new division of Hell. But before entering it the poets must first pass by the Epicurean heretics of circle six. Epicurus, who founded his school in 306 B.C.E., taught that worldly happiness was the highest

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good—but it was a happiness based not on sensual pleasure but on the practice of virtue. By Dante’s time the followers of Epicurus were considered heretics because they implicitly denied the immortality of the soul. It may be surprising to find the pagan philosopher punished in the circle of heretics, since heresy seems a sin dependent solely on orthodox Christianity. But Dante believed that even preChristian pagans recognized (as Plato had) the soul’s immortal status. Thus Epicurus is here in circle six, as are his contemporary followers. One of the most dramatic episodes in the Inferno, Canto 10 abounds in misunderstandings. It therefore reflects the nature of the sin of heresy, which Dante seems to have regarded as uniquely a sin of the intellect, rather than of the will, as was the case with the other sins. Dante believes that the damned are virtually omniscient, having heard Ciacco’s prophesy in Canto 6. Both Farinata and Cavalcante assume that Dante understands their ignorance of the present. Thus Dante is confused when Farinata seems unaware of his party’s defeat and Farinata is shocked to learn of it. Cavalcante misunderstands Dante’s verb tense—denoting past time—and believes his son has died, a misunderstanding that stuns Dante into silence. Since a shared understanding of present circumstances is a necessary condition of mutual comprehension, nothing but confusion can result from this situation. The contrapasso in this circle depends not only on the fact that the heretics who denied the soul’s immortality are sealed forever in tombs, but also on the irony that those sinners who relied chiefly upon their intellect but now know only the future will, in the end, know nothing at all, since the concept of “future” will exist no more after the Last Judgment. One of the great ironies of this canto is that the heretics, relying solely on human intellect, cannot achieve any certain knowledge in Hell, without divine revelation. Farinata’s haughty demeanor suggests the intellectual pride characteristic of the heretics, while Cavalcante’s assumption that human genius is the only possible qualification for Dante’s remarkable journey suggests the same kind of misplaced rationality. Even Virgil himself, the symbol of human reason, falters intellectually in this circle, when he tells the pilgrim that the proph-

ecy of his exile will be made clear when he meets Beatrice: In fact it is not until Dante meets his ancestor CACCIAGUIDA in Canto 17 of the Paradiso that his entire future is revealed. Still Dante’s comment to Cavalcante that his son, Guido, did not make this journey because he held Dante’s guide in disdain is difficult to understand. Assuming that the guide referred to is Virgil, there are a number of possibilities. It may be that Guido did not admire Virgil’s poetry the way that Dante did. But on an allegorical level Virgil may represent human reason particularly in the form of poetic expression. In this symbolic journey that poetic wisdom is leading Dante to divine knowledge: Thus, as John Ciardi has suggested in his edition of the poem, Guido’s skepticism does not allow him to make this imaginative journey. Guido, too—Dante’s “first friend”—is apparently destined to end here among the intellectual heretics. Cavalcante’s love for his son may seem sympathetic here, though it is also a symptom of pride— his son is the preeminent poet and should be the one making this journey, not the lesser poetic genius Dante. But Dante the poet knows that though the pilgrim may be able to calm the father’s fears momentarily, his son in fact would be dead only a few months after the fictional date of the comedy—March 1300. Pride in family is ultimately as empty as Farinata’s pride in his political party—a party that, even as he boasts of it, has been decisively defeated. Dante’s own peaceful conversation with his enemy underscores the kinds of political reversals that occur over time: The victorious Guelphs, having split into feuding factions, will soon send Dante into exile; thus Dante can understand Farinata’s plight. Furthermore the Ghibelline Farinata and the Guelph Cavalcante eternally share the same tomb in Hell. Those who, as did the Epicurean heretics, put all their faith in worldly happiness—in things like family and country—will find that these things are transient as mist, and their immortal souls (whose existence they have refused to recognize) should be their chief concern. Canto 11, consisting mainly of Virgil’s description of Lower Hell and based largely on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics VII.1, might seem self-explanatory. Yet because of certain medieval Christian

Inferno interpretations and even misreadings of Aristotle, the analysis of the structure of Dante’s Hell is less cut and dried than might be assumed. For one thing Dante must include in his geography of Hell places for the pagans and the heretics—two categories that would have been unknown and perhaps meaningless to the pagan Aristotle. In addition Aristotle, dealing with the relative severity of sins, speaks first of sins of incontinence—those resulting from uncontrolled passions. In Dante’s scheme these are the sins associated with the she-wolf and are punished in the first five circles of Upper Hell. Aristotle then discusses malice and what he calls “insane bestiality.” Although Aristotle seems to have meant this as a third category of sin, medieval Christian commentators read Aristotle’s comments to mean that “bestiality” was another type of malice. Some analysts have accordingly suggested that the seventh and eighth circles—those concerned with violence and simple fraud—punish the sins of malice, while the ninth circle—in which treachery to family, country, and benefactors is punished—is the one associated with Aristotle’s “insane bestiality,” since these are the sins that are the most inhuman. It seems more likely, however, that Dante saw the sins of violence as a separate category, reflected in the symbolism of the lion. Thus the sins of brute violence are those reflecting Aristotle’s “insane bestiality.” The two types of fraud illustrate Aristotle’s “malice,” and thus the sins of the leopard. These kinds of sins involve the evil machinations of intellect and are thus less bestial than they are demonic: The deeper one ventures into Hell, in Dante’s system, the worse the sins are.

SINS OF VIOLENCE (THE LION) (CANTOS 12–17) Synopsis Dante and Virgil now enter the seventh circle, the circle of the violent, by making their way down a slope of rocks apparently created by a landslide. Virgil informs Dante that the slide was caused by the earthquake that shook Hell when Christ descended into Limbo to take the souls of the saved into Paradise. At the foot of the slope the poets are accosted by the guardian of this circle, the wild

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and raging Minotaur. Virgil taunts the monstrous half-man, half-bull by reminding him of his defeat by THESEUS, and while the beast bites itself in its blind rage, Virgil tells Dante to run to the pass into circle seven. The first ring of circle seven is a river of boiling blood, the Phlegethon, in which are punished murderers and others who committed sins of violence against other people. The river is guarded by a thousand Centaur archers, who shoot arrows at any souls who try to rise from the boiling blood. Three Centaurs approach the poets: Chiron, the mythic teacher of Achilles, seems to be in command. He is accompanied by Nessus, who in a jealous rage killed Hercules with a poisoned shirt, and Pholus, who in a drunken rage attempted to rape the bride Hippodamia at her own wedding. Chiron notices that Dante’s foot moves the earth as he walks and thus deduces the poet is alive, but Virgil steps in and, once again, convinces the Centaur that the pilgrim’s journey is willed by God. He requests a guide to help carry Dante across the boiling river to the next ring of souls, and Chiron gives the task to Nessus. As Nessus guides the poets to the ford, he points out several of the prominent sinners tormented in the boiling river. The more violent the sinner was in life, the deeper he is submerged in the scalding Phlegethon. Immersed up to their eyelids in the blood are the conquerors ALEXANDER THE GREAT and Attila the Hun, and these are joined by the 13th-century Ghibelline tyrant Ezzelino da Romano, whose atrocities were so infamous he was called the “son of Satan.” Farther on in blood up to his throat is Guy de Montfort, notorious for his murder of Prince Henry of Cornwall at a Holy Mass in Viterbo in 1271. Other sinners are chest-deep, waist-deep, or ankle-deep in blood, and, although Dante recognizes several, he does not stop to talk to any in this round. When they reach the shallowest part of the river, Nessus carries Dante across on his back and leaves the poets on the other side. He returns to his own duties as Dante and Virgil move toward the second ring of circle seven. Now on the other side of the Phlegethon the poets find themselves in the second round of this

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circle, a dense wood of gnarled black trees. This is the Wood of Suicides, the violent against themselves. It is the nesting place of the hideous Harpies, creatures with the bodies of birds and the faces of women. As they enter the wood, Dante hears cries of pain and sorrow but sees no tormented souls. He is puzzled until Virgil tells him to break off a twig from a nearby tree. Dante does so and is shocked to see blood trickle out from the broken branch and to hear the tree cry out in pain. In this round the disembodied souls of the suicides have been trapped for eternity inside the trees. The soul Dante has discovered is that of PIER DELLE VIGNE. In life he was a legal scholar, a poet of the Sicilian school, a statesman and close adviser to the Holy Roman Emperor FREDERICK II OF SWABIA. After years of being the most powerful statesman in Europe, Pier was unjustly accused of treachery and imprisoned by Frederick and ultimately killed himself in prison. He asks that if Dante were to return to the world, he restore Pier’s reputation. His story elicits such sympathy from Dante that the pilgrim cannot speak, and Virgil questions Pier further on Dante’s behalf. How do the souls arrive at this place, he asks, and can they ever escape their imprisonment in the trees? Pier explains that Minos casts the souls of the suicides into this circle, where they take root and grow to be trees. The monstrous Harpies that nest here eat their leaves, causing them pain but also release, since the trees can speak only when broken and bleeding. At the Last Judgment, Pier says, the suicides will not be reunited with their resurrected bodies, since they rejected them in life. Therefore their soulless bodies will be hung on their branches, eternally reminding the suicides of their discarded human form. At this point the poets are interrupted by wild shouting and sounds of a hunt as two naked souls, LANO OF SIENA and GIACOMO (JACOPA OR JACOMO) DA SANTO ANDREA, dash into sight. Lano and Giacomo were profligate squanderers of their own substance in life and here in death are pursued by a pack of ferocious black dogs. Giacomo, unable to keep up, throws himself into a thorn bush to hide, but the dogs overtake him and tear him limb from limb, finally running off with pieces of him in their

mouths. Thus the ring of suicides punishes not only those who took their own lives, but also those who violently destroyed their own property. Now the broken bush in which Giacomo had hidden begins to lament. It is the soul of an unnamed Florentine who hanged himself in his own home. The soul identifies himself as a citizen of that city, which had forsaken its first patron, Mars, for a new Christian patron, SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST. It was because of that slight, the soul claims, that the Roman god of war has never given Florence any peace, and the city would be destroyed forever if not for the vestiges of Mars’s statue on the ARNO’s bridge. As Canto 14 opens, Dante, out of feeling for his native city, gathers the damaged leaves and returns them to the anonymous Florentine suicide, and the poets move on. Reaching the edge of the Wood of Suicides, they look out at the third and last round of the circle of the violent. This is a great expanse of scorching desert sand, on which rains down a steady storm of burning flakes like a fiery snowstorm. On the sand are three groups of sinners, as described by Virgil in Canto 11. These sinners represent the violent against God: Lying stretched out in the sand are the blasphemers, those who cursed God directly. The largest group of souls are those who constantly move along the sand—these are the sodomites, the violent against nature, the child of God. Crouching hunched over in the fiery storm are the usurers—the violent against art (that is, human industry), the child of nature. Among the blasphemers, who are fewest in number in this round, Dante sees a great figure who lies supine in the sand with an attitude of scorn, disdaining to cringe or cry out against the rain of fire. Hearing Dante ask Virgil who he is, the figure calls out that he is the same in death as he was in life—he maintains his contempt for Jove. Virgil addresses the defiant figure as CAPANEUS and tells him that the violence of his own inner rage merely adds to the torment he feels in Hell. Virgil then tells Dante that this Capaneus was one of the seven kings who waged war on Thebes, and that he had died cursing his god from the walls of the city. The poets continue to walk along the edge of the Wood of Suicides, taking care not to step

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Capaneus the Blasphemer, from Canto 14 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

out into the burning sand. Eventually they reach another river of blood, running out of the wood and across the burning sands. When Dante asks about the source of the river, Virgil responds with an elaborate description of one of the most complex allegorical symbols in the Comedy, the Old Man of Crete. In the core of Mount Ida on the island of Crete stands an ancient statue of a man facing Rome. His head is made of gold, his chest and arms of silver, his midsection of brass, and his legs of iron, except for his right foot, which is made of clay. A fissure runs the length of the body, with the exception of the golden head, and from this crack issues a stream of tears and blood. From this stream are formed all the rivers of Hell—the Acheron, the Styx, and the Phlegethon, all of which join to form the Cocytus at the bottom of the Inferno.

In Canto 15 the poets encounter the second group of sinners in this last round of the violent— the sodomites, or the violent against nature. These sinners are forced to wander ceaselessly in groups under the burning rain, though Dante and Virgil are able to cross the plain unhurt by following the boiling brook of the Phlegethon. As they pass a group of sinners, one cries out in recognition. After some effort Dante is able to recognize the burned features of his former mentor, Brunetto Latini. Brunetto leaves his group in order to walk along the river beside Dante and Virgil. Brunetto, an important Florentine statesman and writer, had been Dante’s teacher in his youth. This unexpected reunion allows Dante to speak to his beloved adviser one more time. The affection and respect with which Dante greets Brunetto are greater than are shown any other sinner in

50 Inferno the Inferno: It was Brunetto, Dante says, who first taught him how a man can make himself immortal—referring most probably to Brunetto’s literary efforts in his Trésor. When Brunetto learns why Dante is making this journey through the afterlife, he utters another prophecy about Dante’s future: The citizens of Florence (whom he calls “wild beasts”) will become his enemies, Brunetto tells him, but ultimately he will be greatly honored. Dante answers that he has heard this prophecy before and that he will present the prophecies he has heard to “a lady” (Beatrice) whom he will meet in Paradise. In any case, Dante concludes, Fortune will do as she wills. Virgil seems to approve of this comment, but Dante continues, asking Brunetto the names of some of the other sinners in his band. Brunetto indicates that all of them were scholars and clerics and points out the Latin grammarian Priscian, the Florentine lawyer FRANCESCO D’ACCORSO, and the Florentine bishop Andrea de’ Mozzi. Finally, seeing the approach of another band with whom he is not allowed to mingle, Brunetto bids Dante farewell, asking only that he remember his Trésor, and takes off running across the burning sands to reunite with his own group. The last image of Brunetto is a positive one, as Dante compares him to the winner of a footrace. As Dante and Virgil continue through the seventh circle, they begin to hear the distant sound of a waterfall, where the Phlegethon River they have been following plunges over a cliff into the eighth circle. But as another group of constantly moving sodomites passes them, three souls break away from the band and run toward Dante. They have recognized him as a Florentine from his clothing and are eager to hear news of their native city. Virgil tells Dante that he should treat these three as souls worthy of respect, since they were great figures on earth. When the three shades reach the poets, they form a wheel by holding onto one another and constantly turning—a ploy that allows them to keep moving even as they address the poets. The fiery rain has so damaged the features of the three spirits as to render them unrecognizable, so they must introduce themselves. The trio’s spokesman is JACOPO RUSTICUCCI, a Florentine with a

reputation as a valiant knight, who tells Dante that his own shrewish wife drove him to the sin of sodomy. Jacopo introduces his companions as GUIDO GUERRA (a Guelph captain in a number of successful battles in the mid-13th century) and Tegghiaio Aldobrandi (another Guelph war leader). Their particular band of sinners might be considered warrior sodomites, as opposed to the intellectual sodomites of the previous canto. Dante seems to have held these leaders in high regard, since Jacopo and Tegghiaio were the citizens he had asked Ciacco about in Canto 6, only to be told that they were down among the blackest sinners in Hell. When he sees them, the pilgrim is moved to grief at their suffering. The three warriors ask Dante whether courtesy and valor still reign in their beloved city, and Dante answers with a lament about the decay of Florence, which he attributes to the influx of the newly wealthy from the surrounding rural areas who are displacing the old Florentine gentry and destroying the city through their arrogance and lack of restraint. As the three sinners move away to run back to their band, they ask Dante to remember their names. The poets continue until they reach the roaring waterfall itself, which Dante describes with a long epic simile comparing it to the falls of the Montone River in the Apennines. Here they stop, and Virgil asks Dante for the cord that he has tied around his waist. This is the first mention of the cord in the Inferno, although Dante tells us here that he had intended to use it to snare the leopard in Canto 1. Virgil takes the cord and drops it over the cliff, and Dante wonders what strange response will occur to such an unusual signal. The answer appears quickly, as a huge and terrible shape swims up through the darkness. As Canto 16 ends, Dante makes another address directly to the reader: He swears, by his Comedy (his first specific reference to the work he is narrating), that what he is about to say is true. As Canto 17 opens, the huge shape that approached the poets at the end of Canto 16 now moves into full view and lands at the edge of the cliff where Virgil and Dante stand. Virgil tells Dante to behold the beast that infects the entire

Inferno    51 world. This is the monstrous creature Geryon, a personification of the sin of fraud, with the face of an honest man but a monstrous serpentine body with hairy claws and a scorpionlike tail. At the same time Dante catches sight of another group of sinners, crouching in the burning sands of circle seven as they are pelted with the fiery rain. Virgil tells Dante to go and view these sinners so that his experience of this round may be complete, while Virgil himself negotiates with the monster for their passage down the cliff and into circle eight. The sinners squatting in the sand are the usurers, the violent against art as described in Canto 11. Their features are so obliterated by the scorching rain that Dante does not recognize their faces, but each of them bears a large purse hanging from his neck. Each sinner’s whole attention is focused on the money pouch before his eyes—just as it was

The Descent on the Monster, from Canto 17 of the Inferno, by Gustave Doré. From Dante’s Inferno, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and Illustrated with the Designs of M. Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1885.

in life—and all are unable to move from that position as the flaming precipitation pours down upon them and they try in vain to brush it away with their hands. The sinners are identifiable from the family crests that appear on their bags: A yellow bag displaying an azure lion identifies one sinner as a member of the Gianfigliazzi clan, a Florentine family of Black Guelphs. Another bag, red with a white goose, bears the emblem of the Ubriachi, a Ghibelline family of Florence. One of the sinners snaps irritably at Dante, telling him to go away. The blue sow on the speaker’s pouch identifies him as a member of the Paduan family of Scrovegni— scholars generally identify him as the notorious usurer Rinaldo (or Reginaldo) degli Scrovegni. Since Dante is alive, Rinaldo says, he wants him to know that his Paduan neighbor Vitaliano will soon join him in this circle, and as for the “sovereign knight” that the Florentines are expecting (probably Giovanni Buiamonte), Rinaldo sticks out his tongue as a gesture of scorn. Having learned what he could from the usurers, Dante returns to the cliff’s edge, where Virgil has already mounted the back of Geryon. His guide tells Dante to climb aboard the monster, and the poet does—sitting in front of Virgil, who is intent on shielding Dante from Geryon’s dangerous scorpion tail. Terrified, Dante climbs onto the beast’s serpentine back, and Geryon launches himself into the air, slowly spiraling down until he has deposited the poets at the foot of the cliff, at the edge of the eighth circle of Hell—the circle of the fraudulent, punishing the sins of the leopard. Having completed his task, Geryon flies off like an arrow shot from a bow. Commentary The rockslide that the poets encounter as they enter circle seven was not there when Virgil made his previous journey to the bottom of Hell. That is because it was caused by the earthquake that, according to the Gospels, shook the earth at the time of Christ’s Crucifixion (Matthew 27.51), an event that occurred well after Virgil’s death and, apparently, after his conjuring by the witch Erichtho. Virgil’s statement in lines 41–45 that he thought at the time the quaking was caused by the

52 Inferno universe renewing itself in love is an allusion to the doctrine of the pagan philosopher Empedocles. In a theory cited in Aristotle’s Metaphysics as well as in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle, Empedocles suggested that hate had destroyed the original harmony of the universe and had, as a result, created the individual elements of nature. Love periodically reunites those elements, but hate alternately plunges the elements again into chaos. The Minotaur was a monstrous creature, halfman and half-bull, who was conceived by the unnatural lust of Crete’s queen Pasiphaë for a bull—a sin that Dante would have included among the violent against nature who suffer in the third round of circle seven. The Minotaur, kept in the center of a labyrinth, devoured seven Athenian maidens and youths in an annual tribute until he was finally killed by Theseus with the help of Arachne, daughter of Pasiphaë and King Minos. The centaurs, half-man and half-horse, often are associated in classical mythology with stories of violence and rage. Thus the two guardians of this circle of violence personify the very “insane bestiality” represented in the sins of the lion. The contrapasso of the punishment in the first round of this circle is one of the most obvious in the Inferno: As murderers and tyrants covered themselves in innocent blood during their lives, here in Hell they literally wallow in it. The depth of the river even allows for a gradation of punishment, so that one who killed an individual may be tormented up to his ankles, while a tyrant like Ezzelino, reputed to have burned 11,000 at the stake, is submerged entirely in the boiling blood. It is interesting to note that while the Greek conqueror ALEXANDER THE GREAT appears in this circle, Roman conquerors like GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR are absent. Dante’s respect for and idealization of the Roman Empire do influence his choices here in Canto 12. Canto 13 begins with a series of parallel negative phrases—“No green leaves,” “no smooth branches,” “No fruit” (ll. 4–6)—a rhetorical device called anaphora by medieval rhetoricians. The repeated negatives relate directly to the theme of negation—the suicides’ negation of the gift of life—that pervades this canto. Having cast away

their own bodies, the suicides are denied them for eternity. Even at the Last Judgment, when Christian tradition held that all mortal flesh would rise again and be restored to the immortal souls that claimed it, the souls of the suicides would remain trapped inside their trees. As a part of their contrapasso the suicides are also torn and broken by the foul Harpies and are able to cry out only when bleeding and broken. Thus as the suicide itself is a final expression of pain, so in Hell the suicides’ only means of expression is through more pain. The rhetorical embellishments with which the passage begins continue as an undercurrent through the canto. At one point Dante says of Virgil, “I think perhaps he thought I might be thinking” (l. 25), a turn of phrase that seems unnecessary until we see similar rhetorical devices in the speech of the suicide Pier delle Vigne. Pier, a well-known poet of the Sicilian school, wrote in a style that featured rhetorical flourishes, and in this canto Dante puts lines into his mouth, such as his observation that court gossip “inflamed the hearts of everyone against me, / and these, inflamed, inflamed in turn Augustus [i.e., Frederick II]” (ll. 67–68). Thus Dante, who considered the style of the Sicilian poets artificial and therefore defective, anticipates Pier’s speech with the pilgrim’s own line (25) and imitates Pier’s style with the statesman’s speech. It should be noted that the pity Dante displays for Pier is of a different sort than his earlier sympathy for Francesca or Ciacco. Here rather than pity the suffering caused by Pier’s just punishment, Dante feels sympathy because of the unjust accusations that caused Pier’s downfall. Thus it is now injustice, rather than justice, that rouses the pilgrim’s emotions. It seems likely that Dante got the idea for the suicides’ punishment directly from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which, in a scene Virgil alludes to in this canto (Aeneid 3.22–43), Aeneas breaks a branch off a shrub and is stunned to see blood pour from the shrub’s broken point. At the same time he hears the voice of Polydorus, a Trojan prince, speaking from the ground beneath the shrub, where he lies buried. Turning what Virgil presents as a marvelous occurrence into the just punishment for suicide is Dante’s own innovation.

Inferno The Harpies, daughters of Thaumas and Electra in classical mythology, also appear in Virgil’s Aeneid, where they befoul the Trojans’ dinner and forecast further adversity for them. Pictured as monstrous birds with the faces of women and large, cruel talons, the Harpies of myth were known for polluting everything they touched. But they also had the reputation of being the “hounds of Zeus” and in that capacity seized the souls of mortals, carrying them to torment in the next world. Most probably Dante thought of them in this role and so places them in this round. But note that they also continue the motif of half-human monsters (including the Minotaur and the Centaurs) serving as guardians of circle seven, underscoring again the “insane bestiality” of the sins of violence. The second group of sinners consigned to this round may seem redundant. We have already seen the “wasters” of Canto 7, paired with the misers and pushing large stones around circle four. But Dante clearly wants us to regard the sin of profligates like Lano and Giacomo as something different. The wastefulness of circle four is presented as one of the sins of incontinence and therefore should be viewed as a failure of will: The wasters lost their fortunes as a result of lack of self-control. The profligates of circle seven, however, are willfully reckless in their squandering: They do deliberate violence to their goods and therefore destroy their own property without remorse, merely for the sake of extravagance. Thus they parallel the suicides, destroying their livelihoods rather than their lives. Finally the unnamed Florentine suicide whose speech ends the canto is surely an allegorical symbol of the city of Florence itself. The soul’s suicide parallels the city’s internecine strife, through which the city seems bent on its own deliberate destruction. The metaphor of Mars’s anger seems a fanciful way of suggesting that war, the “art” of Mars, seems destined ultimately to tear the city apart. The statue of Mars alluded to did, in fact, stand on the Ponte Vecchio until 1333, when it was swept away by a flood 12 years after Dante’s death. The burning plain of Canto 14, where the violent against God, nature, and art are punished, is one of the more complicated contrapassos in

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the Inferno. The desert itself suggests sterility: One characteristic that for Dante links the sins of blasphemy, sodomy, and usury is that they are essentially barren and fruitless activities. Sodomy is sexuality without the possibility of reproduction. Usury is an act in which money—inanimate matter—reproduces itself unnaturally, as opposed to the natural earning of money through labor. Blasphemy, the sin most directly against God, is equally fruitless: As a defiance of God, the blasphemy of Capaneus and others like him can bear no fruit. The omnipotent God will squelch any such defiance before it takes root. Furthermore rain, which under normal circumstances regenerates life in the fertile earth, in this unnatural realm falls as scorching fire, burning the sinners with an intense heat suggesting the violence of their own sins. Capaneus himself, as Virgil points out, suffers as well from the twisted wrath of his own inner soul. Capaneus boasts that he is in death just what he was in life, but that is the case of every sinner in Hell, and it is in fact each sinner’s punishment. Their own sins that separate them from God cause them an inner torment outwardly reflected in the contrapasso of their physical sufferings. As does Capaneus, each sinner in Hell has willed his own punishment. That the pagan Capaneus, struck dead by the thunderbolt of Jove, should be used as the representative of the Christian sin of blasphemy may strike the reader as curious. Here as elsewhere in the Inferno, Dante uses a pagan legend to illustrate what he clearly saw as a Christian truth. But it seems apparent that Dante saw the classical world as a cradle of Christian civilization, and that although classical pagans lacked the advantage of Christian revelation, they were not exempt from natural law—one aspect of which was the recognition of God’s existence and attendant obligation to worship and serve him in whatever form they were able to conceive him. Thus Capaneus’s blasphemy is inexcusable, whether he is a pagan or not. The elaborate symbol of the Old Man of Crete that takes up most of Canto 14 is drawn from two major sources: The figure itself is from the Old Testament book of Daniel (2.32–34), where it is an image seen in a dream by King Nebuchadnezzar.

54 Inferno In that text Daniel interprets the figure with its layers of gold, silver, brass, and iron as a symbol of four successive kingdoms. Dante borrows the symbol but changes the interpretation, so that the statue reflects the four ages of man outlined in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid speaks of a golden age, which Dante would have seen in Christian terms as Paradise before the fall of man. Since human sin corrupted the world, Dante would suggest, there has been a gradual decay into a silver age, a brass (or bronze) age, and an iron age. There are a variety of interpretations for the feet of the statue, but it seems likely that the left foot, made of iron, is intended to represent the Holy Roman Empire, while the crumbling right foot of clay denotes the contemporary Roman Catholic Church—unable to bear the weight placed upon it, cracked by its own corruption and its involvement in the secular affairs of Europe. Thus one of the purposes of this elaborate symbol is to make a political statement about Europe’s need for a single world emperor, one who can bear the weight of European civilization and take away the secular power and responsibility of the papacy. The statue stands on the island of Crete, regarded in the classical world as the cradle of the golden age and as the center of the world, situated in the sea among the three known continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. From Crete sprang the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. The statue faces the west, looking toward Rome—the center of the Imperial and Christian worlds—and thus perhaps looks toward the future and a possible renewal. Its back is turned on the Egyptian city of Damietta—the East, perhaps suggesting the birthplace of religion, perhaps suggesting the contemporary Muslim world, perhaps suggesting the past. Dante has added the fissure that mars every part of the statue except the golden head. This may denote human sin, which has marred every age of man since Paradise. From this crack flow the tears of human history, all of the tears and sorrow caused by human sin, and these tears become the waters that form the rivers of Hell. Certainly one of the most elaborate symbols in the Comedy, the Old Man of Crete remains in some ways elusive in its meaning.

A reader who subscribes to the popular view that Dante uses his Inferno to settle personal and political scores, placing all of his enemies into Hell, might be surprised to find Dante’s old mentor Brunetto Latini in the third round of circle seven. Dante himself seems surprised, greeting his old teacher with the exclamation “Are you here?” (Canto 15, l. 30). This surprise may imply that Brunetto’s sodomy was not widely known in Florence, particularly as Brunetto was married and the father of several children and had in fact reproved homosexuality in his own works. One can only conclude that Dante was close enough to his old master to have been aware of Brunetto’s sexual preference, even if many other Florentines were not. Both Brunetto and Dante speak with great affection for each other, and Brunetto’s discourse in the canto is particularly delicate, one might even say dainty: “How marvelous!” is his exclamation when he recognizes the pilgrim (l. 24). This canto is filled with imagery that suggests the nature of the sin here punished. The group of men with whom Brunetto travels are first described as ogling Dante (ll. 17–19). Brunetto himself uses a good deal of fruit imagery as well as suggestive animal imagery in his conversation with Dante, calling the pilgrim a “sweet fig” that his enemies will seek to devour. Brunetto’s appearance introduces a theme that will become more significant as the Comedy progresses: In some ways Dante’s journey through the afterlife—and, allegorically, through his own psyche—is a quest for his absent father. Dante’s own father, ALIGHIERO DI BELLINCIONE D’ALIGHIERO (ALIGHIERO II), died when the poet was in his midteens, and in some ways the elder statesman Brunetto served as a father figure to him. Indeed Brunetto calls the pilgrim “my son” in line 31. Part of what happens in Canto 15 of the Inferno is Dante’s rejection of Brunetto as father. Dante clearly had respected and loved Brunetto. He addresses the older writer with the honorific title Ser. But Dante’s disillusionment with Brunetto is clear in this canto. It stems not from Brunetto’s sodomy per se, but from his general worldly attitude, which has prevented his repentance and therefore his salvation. This is an attitude that is clear throughout the canto: Brunetto, who had

Inferno    55

Brunetto Latini, from Canto 15 of the Inferno, by Gustave Doré. From Dante’s Inferno, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and Illustrated with the Designs of M. Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1885.

been instrumental in promoting classicism and humanism in 13th-century Florence, was famous for teaching rhetoric, for extolling philosophy as the highest discipline of study, and for pioneering the study of politics as a science. To Dante, his prophecy, taking a long historical perspective, looks back before the Black and White rivalry or the GuelphGhibelline wars, to ancient clashes between the original Etruscan inhabitants of Fiesole (the “wild beasts” of his prophecy) and the patrician Roman families, from whom Dante is descended, who settled and ultimately dominated the area. He says that Dante is one of the “holy seed” of Rome. He predicts, too, that Dante’s destiny will ultimately

be great honor. Finally Dante acknowledges that Brunetto was the one who first taught him how a man “makes himself immortal” (l. 85). What Brunetto-as-father taught was that immortality is gained through scholarly or literary achievement. He is the first sinner in Hell who states his entire name, as if intent on its being remembered. Somewhat unfazed by Hell (he never tries to rationalize his sin, as many others in the Inferno do), Brunetto is most concerned that Dante remember his Trésor. Thus Brunetto’s lesson is that immortality is conferred through worldly fame, that “holiness” is a matter of ancestry, and that scholarship is the chief end of earthly life.

56 Inferno Undoubtedly the honors he predicts for Dante after his exile are worldly ones. By the time Dante sees Brunetto here in circle seven, however, he has outgrown his old master. Through the guidance of his new father figure, Virgil, Dante has already learned (in Canto 7) that earthly goods and honor are in the hands of Fortune (to which he alludes in lines 93–96), and that divine justice has nothing to do with worldly glory. Ultimately Dante will transcend the influence of Virgil, too, as father, and in Canto 15 of the Paradiso he will meet Cacciaguida, his ancestor and ultimate father figure, who will make sense of all the other prophecies, exhort Dante to tell the whole truth in his Comedy for the edification of humankind, and demonstrate that true glory and honor are in Paradise, in the love of God—the true and flawless Father. Several questions are raised by the events of Canto 16. The first of these concerns Virgil’s respectful attitude toward the three warrior sodomites who break from their group to approach Dante. Virgil advises Dante to treat them with courtesy, and the pilgrim not only does so but pities their wretched punishment under the rain of fire. Scholars have remarked that the speech in this canto, of both Jacopo Rusticucci (spokesman for the three sodomites) and the pilgrim Dante himself, is elevated and courteous. Jacopo wants to know whether courtesy and valor still exist in Florence. Clearly the idea of “courtesy” is important in this canto. Courtesy (or cortezia) was an ideal colored by hundreds of years of medieval courtly literature and culture. It connoted, for Dante and his contemporaries, the ideal character and behavior of a noble person, including generosity, virtuous and refined manners, and above all personal honor, as Dante makes clear in his CONVIVIO (2.10.7–8). Both Dante and the three sinners display that virtue of courtesy in this canto, and perhaps it is the attribute of courtesy that Virgil recognizes in them that compels him to advise the pilgrim to treat the sinners with respect. Jacopo, Guido, and Tegghiaio were aristocratic knights, known for their personal valor and their patriotism, and Dante has admired them and their legacy all his life. Virgil, as human reason, values patriotism, honor, self-sacrifice, and

courtesy and recognizes these in the three sodomites; therefore he tells his ward to honor them. But surely the reader’s response in this Canto should not uncritically follow the pilgrim’s, or even that of his usually reliable guide. It should not be forgotten that when Dante spoke admiringly about these same souls to Ciacco in Canto 6, he was told they were among the blackest sinners in Hell. As Brunetto Latini does in the previous canto, these sinners fail to acknowledge their guilt—only Jacopo mentions his sin, and he blames his wife for it rather than taking personal responsibility. Like Brunetto, they are still concerned with the things of the world—that is, the fate of their city and their reputations. These are matters that are under the governance of Fortune, as Dante the pilgrim has just told Brunetto. What is admired by human reason, such as scholarly achievement, military achievement, and devotion to the narrow Guelph cause, even the worldly ideal of courtesy, must ultimately be transcended in the spiritual sphere. Salvation depends on other considerations. Dante’s condemnation of his native city may embody his rejection of the courtesy, martial prowess, and partisanship of the three Guelph sodomites. Rather than answer Jacopo’s question directly, he assumes the stance of an Old Testament prophet, raising his face to Heaven and addressing his diatribe directly to the city of Florence. Previously Dante the poet had put condemnations of his native city in the mouths of characters like Ciacco and Brunetto or had implied the self-destructiveness of the city through the anonymous Florentine suicide of Canto 13, or the decay of civilization itself (including Florence) in the image of the Old Man of Crete in Canto 14. But here Dante has his persona speak in his own voice to give an oracular denunciation of his native city. To the pride, envy, and greed with which other characters have charged the Florentines before, Dante adds the problem of the destabilizing impact of the influx of rural citizens and of the excesses and arrogance caused by sudden wealth. For the conservative Dante these economic and social troubles further undermined the Christian and Imperial Roman basis of the Florentine state. Much of the immorality of the corrupt city stems from commercial inter-

Inferno ests and the development of capitalism in Florence through the 13th century, issues that move to the fore in the following canto. In Paradise Dante will hear more on these matters from Cacciaguida. The most vexing question raised by this canto, however, is the meaning of the cord that Dante gives to Virgil as they stand on the edge of the precipice leading to circle eight. One interpretation is that it is simply a practical innovation: Dante needed something that Virgil could use to signal the monster Geryon, and the pilgrim’s cord was simply a convenient invention. Some have also suggested, on the basis that Dante was ultimately buried in a Franciscan churchyard (and with no other verifiable evidence), that Dante himself had once been a novice in the Franciscan order (perhaps after the death of Beatrice). The cord, then, would represent the cord traditionally worn by Franciscan friars. Neither of these readings seems satisfactory. The fact that although the cord has not been mentioned before, Dante draws our attention to it, saying he had intended to snare the leopard of Canto 1 with it, suggests that there is something more to this cord than a literal reading would imply. Since the cord used as a belt is essentially a girdle, it is possible that Dante is here alluding to Pliny, who speaks of capturing a hyena by using a girdle with seven knots. In such a sense the girdle is a symbol of strength, allowing its wearer to accomplish some important feat—in this case, to capture the leopard. But if this is the point of the cord, why does Dante allow Virgil to toss it away? Another idea is that the cord symbolizes chastity, and thus was to be used to catch the leopard, symbolic of the sins of incontinence. Having passed those circles of Hell, Dante no longer needs the cord. But most readers see the leopard as symbolic of fraud, the section of Hell toward which Dante is about to descend. And besides, Dante has been in the circle of the violent for several cantos—it would have made more sense in this scenario for him to have discarded the cord before entering the city of Dis. Early commentators on the Comedy saw the cord as a symbol of fraud: When Dante hands it to Virgil, it is coiled, symbolizing the twisted, serpentine nature of fraud itself; thus it is used to call Geryon,

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the monstrous personification of fraud. On the other hand, Mark Musa sees the cord as symbolic of self-confidence—a foolish sort of self-confidence that would lead the pilgrim to believe he could snare the leopard himself. Through reason (Virgil) the pilgrim loses his bravado. The cord, symbol of that naïve pride, naturally attracts the personification of fraud. Dante will receive a new girdle in the first Canto of the Purgatorio—this time a reed, the symbol of humility. Perhaps the symbol of the cord looks forward to the next circle in this way. But it would seem that, having just gone through a kind of rejection of the intellectual and political heroes of his youth, Dante may be looking back at Cantos 15 and 16 here: As the pilgrim divests himself of his cord and discards it forever, so perhaps (as Ricardo Quinones suggests) Dante is dissolving his ties to his native city (122). If the cord indeed symbolizes self-confidence, it may be the kind of confidence in the scholarly and military excellence of the Florentines he has just met in these two cantos that Dante here finally discards. The beast Geryon in Canto 17 is based on a figure in classical mythology who was king of the island of Erytheia west of Gibraltar. In the myth he was a giant with three heads and was the uncle of the three-headed dog Cerberus. He was ultimately killed by Hercules over his great herd of cattle. Medieval legends with which Dante would have been familiar make Geryon a Spanish king with a reputation for enticing dinner guests into his home only to kill them. It seems likely that this particular reputation was behind Dante’s making Geryon a personification of the sin of fraud. But Dante gives him a different physical shape, based partly on the book of Revelation (9.7–11), wherein are described locusts with the faces of men and the tails of scorpions. Geryon’s honest face belies his scorpion’s tail, and his reptilian torso decorated with colored rings recalls the coat of the leopard in Canto 1. At this major transitional point in the poem, as the pilgrim Dante prepares to leave the circle of violence and enter the circles of fraud, Virgil appears to be much more confident and assured than he was at the last major transition, at the gates of Dis (Canto 8), where he was nearly thwarted by the

58 Inferno rebel angels. Now he clearly convinces an unwilling Geryon to transport him and his ward to the bottom of the cliff. Virgil rides astride the monster like a poised horseman and sits between Dante and the monster’s sting like a protective father. Despite Virgil’s self-assurance, however, Dante’s anxiety as they spiral down to the floor of circle eight comes through in the similes through which he describes their flight. The poet compares their descent to two disastrous mythological excursions: Apollo’s son, Phaeton, who, having borrowed his father’s sun-chariot, lost control and burned the sky before Zeus, to save the earth itself from flames, destroyed Phaeton with a thunderbolt. Icarus, flying with wax wings invented by his father, Daedalus, to escape the Labyrinth of Crete, ignored his father’s warnings and flew too close to the sun, at which point his wings melted and he plummeted to death in the sea. Dante, putting himself in the position of Phaeton or Icarus, clearly feels his own lack of experience and confidence and fears for his life. As for the sinners of this canto, the usurers are the last described of the violent. Like the other sinners of circle seven, theirs is a sin reflected in the dry desert waste that allegorically represents their sterility. The reproduction of money—an inanimate thing—is unnatural and a form of violence against industry, the child of nature. Further their eternal gaze upon the money pouches hanging before them is a part of the contrapasso of this canto: As in life their focus was solely on their money, so in death they cannot take their eyes from the worthless pouches that hang from their necks. Further they are unrecognizable. Only their coats of arms identify them as members of noble families of usurers, but essentially they have lost their human identity by focusing only on inanimate gold. In this they are not unlike the misers and the wasters in Canto 7, who are similarly indistinguishable. After the rhetorically refined speech of Brunetto Latini and the courteous words of Jacopo Rusticucci, the blatant rudeness of Scrovegni the Paduan usurer in this canto is particularly jarring. In one sense it serves to startle the pilgrim into a realization of the true nature of the sins in this circle. Any lingering affection he may have for the worldly glories of his native city—the scholarly

achievements associated with Brunetto or the military glories represented by Jacopo—is wiped away by the indignity of the crouching usurers, nearly all of whom are Florentines, and who suggest the corrupting influence of the budding capitalism that Dante had condemned in his tirade against his city in Canto 16. Canto 17 is one of the few cantos in the Comedy in which the pilgrim Dante never speaks. Perhaps he is stunned into silence by Scrovegni’s jarring rudeness. Or perhaps the flight on Geryon’s back makes him too frightened to speak. In either case it is a canto in which the pilgrim mulls over what he has seen and learned in circle seven, and prepares himself for the rigors of Hell’s eighth circle.

SIMPLE FRAUD (THE LEOPARD) (CANTOS 18–30) Synopsis As Canto 18 opens, Dante gives a detailed description of the physical structure of circle eight. Called Malebolge, or “evil pockets,” the circle consists of 10 concentric ditches (or bolgia), each slightly lower than the last, so that the entire circle slopes downward to a deep central well that will ultimately lead down to the ninth and last circle. Each ditch is edged by two stone banks and is crossed by several stone bridges, each of which leads from the cliff wall across all 10 ditches to the well at the center or hub, giving the entire circle the appearance of a giant spoked wheel. It has been suggested that Dante’s description of Malebolge is not presented as exposition by Dante the poet but is rather a picture of Malebolge as Dante the pilgrim sees it, descending on the back of the monster Geryon—it is, in fact, an aerial view of the landscape. The poets begin to walk to the left, as they almost invariably do, along the edge of the first bolgia. Here they see two lines of naked sinners, one line moving in the same direction as the poets, the other line facing them. Both groups are being driven along by horned devils wielding whips, who beat the sinners without mercy. Dante learns that this is the bolgia of panderers and seducers. The line moving toward the poets is made up of pimps or panderers, those who broker sexual favors. Among these souls

Inferno    59 Dante recognizes one who tries to avoid his gaze. This is Venedico Caccianemico of Bologna, who admits to Dante that he tried to curry favor with the marquis of Este by offering the marquis his own sister. Venedico also maintains that this particular bolgia is full of Bolognians. At this point one of the devils whips him and forces him on. When Dante and Virgil reach the stone bridge that crosses the first bolgia, they climb up and Virgil tells Dante to look back, so that he can see the faces of the crowd of souls who had been walking in the same direction as the poets. These are the seducers, those who have used women for their own purposes and then abandoned them. Among these Virgil points out the soul of Jason, who seduced and forsook both Hypsipyle and Medea. Curiously Virgil shows a certain respect for Jason, apparently admiring him for shedding no tears of pain. The poets continue on the bridge and start across the second bolgia, where they are greeted with a noxious stench. Dante finds that the entire ditch is filled with excrement, as if all the world’s privies emptied into this one trench. Immersed in the foul sewage are the souls of the flatterers, those whose words were the verbal equivalent of the waste in which they spend eternity. Dante recognizes one of these shades, remarking with grim irony that he knew the sinner “when his hair was dry.” This is Alessio Interminei (or Interminelli) from Lucca, who owns himself to be a notorious flatterer. In addition Virgil points out to the pilgrim another shade, scratching herself with filthy fingernails: It is Thaïs the whore, infamous for her egregious flattery of her lover in a classical play by Terence. The poets spend little time here, and, having seen enough, they hurry on to the third bolgia. Canto 19 opens with an apostrophe to Simon Magus, the magician who in the Acts of the Apostles (8.14–24) attempts to buy spiritual power from Saint Peter and Saint John the Apostle. This was the first instance of the sin of simony—the buying or selling of ecclesiastical sacraments or offices. Dante saw this prostitution of the church as a widespread abomination that in his day corrupted the church hierarchy from the top down. He follows this initial apostrophe with another, this time

to Divine Wisdom, praising God for the just punishment that simoniacs endure in the third bolgia of Hell’s Malebolge. From the bridge that spans the third bolgia Dante and Virgil observe a rocky ditch pocked with holes that Dante compares in size and shape to the baptismal fonts in Florence’s Baptistry of San Giovanni. From each of the countless holes protrude the legs of a sinner, and the soles of each sinner’s feet are flaming as the legs kick in agony. Thus the simoniacs, who perverted their holy offices, are stuffed head-first into these fiery fonts in a perverted parody of baptism. Dante expresses an interest in speaking to the soul whose feet seemed to burn redder, and whose legs he notices are kicking more frenziedly, than the others. Obligingly, Virgil carries the pilgrim down the slope at the far end of the ditch.

The Simonists, from Canto 19 of the Inferno, by Gustave Doré. From Dante’s Inferno, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and Illustrated with the Designs of M. Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1885.

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Dante addresses the twitching legs, asking the sinner to speak if he can. But the sinner’s response stuns Dante, for the soul has mistaken the pilgrim for his own enemy, Pope Boniface VIII. The sinner reveals himself to be POPE NICHOLAS III. Nicholas admits that he was guilty of simony, using his position to enhance the wealth of his family through papal appointments. Now, Nicholas puns, just as he pocketed wealth on earth, here in Hell he himself is stuffed into a pocket. Mistaking Dante for Boniface, he believed at first that he had misread the future by three years because, with the foreknowledge of the damned, he knows that Boniface is due to replace him in this hole upon his death in 1303. When Boniface arrives, Nicholas says, he himself will be shoved farther into the hole, already filled with previous simoniac popes. Nicholas adds that Boniface will soon be followed by an even worse simoniac, POPE CLEMENT V, the puppet of the French king PHILIP IV THE FAIR, due to replace Boniface in 1314 and shove the previous popes even deeper into the rock. At this point Dante launches into a tirade of abuse directed at the sinful pope. How much, he asks, did Saint Peter have to pay Christ for his spiritual gifts? Nicholas’s punishment is well earned, the pilgrim asserts, and all churchmen like him cause grief for the whole world. They are no better than idolators, since idolators worship only one golden object, while the simoniacs worship hundreds. Finally in another apostrophe Dante takes the emperor CONSTANTINE THE GREAT himself to task, for it was he, according to medieval legend, who first granted a wealth of worldly property to the church. If it were not for the respect he has for the office of pope, Dante says, he would use even harsher words to condemn Nicholas. This is only the second time in the Inferno (the first since Filippo Argenti in Canto 8) that Dante truly lambastes one of the sinners he meets. His righteous anger pleases his guide, who lifts him affectionately and carries him up the rocky slope to the bridge that arches the next bolgia. After the oracular heights of Dante’s speech condemning the simoniacs, he opens Canto 20 with a very prosaic announcement that we are now in the 20th canto of his first book. Here in the

fourth bolgia the poets witness the punishment of the soothsayers or fortune tellers. Those who by means of magic sought to look forward beyond the limits placed on human beings are punished for eternity by a bizarre distortion of their human form: Their heads are twisted to look backward instead of forward, and these mutilated sinners walk slowly through the ditch, weeping so that their tears flow continually down their backs and between their buttocks. At the sight of these twisted forms, Dante weeps for pity—once again after his diatribe against the sin of simony, Dante seems to backslide into pity for the sinners. Virgil chastises his ward, clarifying the true nature of augury: These are people who, by trying to learn the mind of God, sought to bend it to their own will. Such evil, he tells Dante, is not deserving of pity. Virgil proceeds to point out among the group of seers four particular sinners from classical literature. The first is Amphiaraus, one of the seven kings who warred on Thebes (a companion of Capaneus from Canto 14), whose story is told in PUBLIUS PAPINUS STATIUS’s Thebaid. The second is Tireseas, the famous blind Theban prophet who was changed from male to female and back to male, and whose story Dante would have known also from Statius, as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The third is Aruns, the Etruscan driver whose prediction of the Roman civil war and Caesar’s victory over Pompey is told in Book 1 of Lucan’s Pharsalia. The last classical prophet mentioned is Tiresias’s daughter, MANTO, whose story appears in the Aeneid (Book 10). Here, however, Dante has Virgil retell her story at some length. He describes the alpine Lake Benaco and its course ending in a lowland marsh. Here, Virgil says, the wandering Manto and her servants settled to escape all human contact and practice magic. Here she died, and later when the local people built a city on that spot, they named it after her: Mantua, Virgil’s birthplace. In his earlier version of the story Virgil had attributed the city’s founding to Manto’s son, Ocnus. Thus Dante’s character Virgil corrects the faulty version of the city’s founding that he had written in his own Aeneid, which he refers to here as his “high tragedy” well known to Dante. He urges Dante to tell the true story as he has just related it.

Inferno Now Virgil looks at some of the other sinners in the circle and names several other shades, pointing out Eurypylus, who appears in the Aeneid (2.114– 119) as one asked to learn from Apollo’s oracle the best time for the Greeks to sail from Troy. Virgil then mentions three modern prophets: MICHAEL SCOTT, a supposed magician and seer attached to the court of Frederick II; Guido Bonatti, an astrologer who served Frederick II as well as the tyrant Ezzelino (mentioned in Canto 12); and Asdente (“the toothless”), a cobbler of Parma reputed to be a magician. The canto ends as Virgil, once again revealing a knowledge of the movement of the heavens that itself seems magical and prophetic here in Hell, warns his protégé that the moon has set, and that they must hurry to the next bolgia. As Dante and Virgil begin to cross the bridge over the fifth bolgia, the poets look down into a trench filled with boiling pitch that reminds Dante of the caulking of ships in the Venice shipyards. Dante sees bubbles rising from the pitch but can see nothing beneath the surface. Suddenly Virgil shouts to him to watch out, snatching him out of the way as a black devil rushes by, carrying a senator from the city of Lucca. He tosses the sinner into the pitch, telling the other demons who serve as guards in this bolgia that he is going back for more, because Lucca is full of grafters. The poets have indeed arrived in the Hell of the grafters, those who used their position in pubic service to make money illegally. The devils who guard them are called the malebranche (evil claws), and they all carry grappling hooks. When the Luccan senator rises up from the pitch to float above, a hundred devils rake him with their hooks, telling him to keep below the surface or be torn to pieces. They remind Dante of cooks stirring meat in a stew. Virgil is concerned that Dante stay hidden from these demons and tells him to conceal himself behind a rock while Virgil himself continues across the bridge to negotiate their safe passage with the leader of the demons. As Virgil approaches, the devils surround him menacingly, threatening him with their hooks. Virgil demands to speak with one of them, and Malacoda (evil tail) steps forward arrogantly. But when Virgil convinces him that

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he and his charge would not have progressed so far without the aid of the divine will, Malacoda is deflated and agrees to allow the poets to pass his bolgia. Virgil calls for Dante, and the pilgrim moves out of hiding to join his mentor, fearful of the demons, who he says remind him of soldiers he once saw outside Caprona. When a demon called Scarmiglione threatens to stick the poet with his hook, Malacoda orders him not to harm the pilgrims. He then tells them that the bridge over the sixth bolgia is broken—that it broke, in fact, during the earthquake that accompanied the Crucifixion of Christ 1,266 years earlier. But the bridge farther along this ditch is still intact, Malacoda says, and sends the pilgrims off under the protection of 10 of his company, with the unlikely names of Alichino, Calcabrina, Cagnazzo (Big Dog), Barbariccia (Curlybeard), Libicocco, Draghignazzo (Evil Dragon), Ciriatto, Graffiacane (Scratching Dog), Farfarello, and Rubicante (Crazy Red). Dante expresses misgivings about their demonic escort, but Virgil reassures him, saying that the devils are a threat only to the sinners in that bolgia. As the squad prepares to move out with the pilgrims, they salute their captain by sticking out their tongues and making a rude “Bronx cheer,” while Malacoda answers their salute by farting like a trumpet. As Canto 22 opens, the narrator remarks, with tongue in cheek, that he has seen a wide variety of military salutes but never before has witnessed a bugle call like the one demonstrated by Malacoda at the end of the previous canto. Virgil and Dante move out with the 10 Malebranche demons assigned to see them to the next bridge over the sixth bolgia, and as they walk Dante keeps his eyes focused on the river of boiling pitch, better to witness the plight of the sinners immersed there. He notices the souls of many grafters squatting like frogs with their snouts barely out of the pitch, who duck back under the surface when they see the Malebranche pass by. Unfortunately one of these shades is too slow in darting back into the bubbling pitch, and the demon Graffiacane is able to snatch him with his hook. His hook twisted in the sinner’s hair, Graffiacane holds the grafter out, dangling him from

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Ciampolo tormented by the devils, from Canto 22 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

his pruning hook as the other devils prepare to tear him apart. At a word from Dante, who is curious about this shade, Virgil is able to forestall the torment of the sinner in order to interrogate him. The shade reveals that he was born in Navarre and served a Spanish aristocrat before taking a post with Thibault II (count of Champagne and king of Navarre in the mid-13th century), where he learned the sin of barratry (or graft). Suddenly the devil Ciriatto rips into the sinner’s body with a tusk. As the other demons chafe at being kept back, frantic to begin tearing their victim apart, their captain Barbariccia holds out his arms to protect the unnamed Navarrese, warning the others to keep away until the questioning is done. He then turns to Virgil and tells him to ask his questions quickly. Bearing in mind his ward’s own interests, Virgil asks the shade whether there

are any Italians below in the pitch. But just as he asks the question, the demon Libicocco tears off a piece of the shade’s arm while Draghignazzo goes for his leg. Barbariccia calms them down, and the Navarrese answers that he has just been speaking with the Sardinian friar FRA GOMITA OF GALLURA, who spends most of his time conversing with another Sardinian grafter, MICHEL ZANCHE. The poets’ interest in Italian grafters gives the Navarrese a chance to strike a deal with the Malebranche. He can lure several grafters out of the pitch for the demons’ amusement, he says, if the Malebranche will hide themselves. Then, he promises, he will give the secret “all-clear” whistle that the sinners use to let other grafters know it is safe to poke their heads above the surface. Cagnazzo is unwilling to trust the Navarrese, but the devil Arlichino wants to take the risk. As he turns to

Inferno hide, however, Arlichino warns the Navarrese that he had better not try to escape, because the devil’s wings are much faster than the sinner’s feet. But just as the group of devils turns, the Navarrese seizes his opportunity and dives back to the “safety” of the boiling pitch. Arlichino flies after him but is too late, like a hawk diving for a wild duck that dives below the water just in time. Meanwhile the enraged Cagnazzo flies after Arlichino to attack him for his ill-advised trust of the sinner. The two demons battle like hawks above the pitch and finally fall into it themselves. Now Barbariccia orders the other demons to rescue their two struggling comrades, and while tempers heat up among the devils, the two poets decide that this would be an opportune time to slip away and continue their journey without the demonic escort. As Canto 23 opens and the poets quietly move away from the angry Malebranche, Dante is reminded of Aesop’s fable of the frog, the mouse, and the hawk, in which the frog’s trickery ultimately leads to his being devoured by the hawk. The fable itself gives Dante pause, however: Because the Malbranche were tricked as a result of the poets’ request, Dante suddenly fears that the thwarted devils will turn their rage from the Navarrese to the poets. When Dante makes his fears known to Virgil, the elder poet answers that he has had the same thought and advises Dante that they escape over the ridge that leads down into the sixth bolgia. As they glance back, the poets see the raging Malebranche bearing down on them with wings outstretched. Virgil acts quickly. Taking the terrified pilgrim into his arms like a mother holding her child, the Roman poet slides on his back down the slope, holding Dante before him, until they reach the floor of the sixth ditch. As the poets look back up to the top of the ridge, they see the 10 angry devils glaring impotently down upon them: The Malebranche are unable to leave the fifth bolgia, since the divine will that placed them there as guardians also made them prisoners of that specific ditch. As Dante looks around the sixth bolgia, he sees an endless line of sinners marching in single file. Each of the weeping souls is dressed in a long cloak

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and hood, like a Benedictine monk. But Dante sees that the cloaks, which are a dazzling gold on the outside, are lined with lead, so that each sinner strains under the weight of his own lavish robes. These are the hypocrites, whose dazzling outside masks a burdened inner life. The poets, as usual, turn left and walk in the same direction as the sinners, but the burdened shades trudge so slowly that the poets pass several of them with every step. Dante asks Virgil to point out any sinners in the crowd who might be known to Dante, and at those words one of the sinners, recognizing Dante’s Tuscan accent, calls out to him to slow down so they can converse. Virgil advises Dante to alter his step so that the other can catch up. When the speaker draws up beside the pilgrim, he first watches Dante intently, then turns to the shade beside him, commenting that by the movement of his throat he knows that Dante is alive. The sinner then asks who Dante is and why he has been allowed to visit this circle of Hell. Dante replies only that he is a Florentine and is indeed alive, but then he asks the shade who he is and what kind of punishment he is bearing. The speaker identifies himself as CATALANO DEI MALAVOLTI and names his companion as LODERINGO DEGLI ANDALÒ. The two of them were members of the religious order popularly known as the Jovial Friars. Citizens of Bologna, they had been appointed jointly to the office of podestà in Florence in 1266 and charged to keep the peace. But their joint appointment was disastrous and full of civil unrest, including the destruction of the Gardingo district of Florence, where important Ghibelline families lived. Under their watch the Florentine Ghibelline party was exiled from the city. Recognizing the Jovial Friars as culpable in much of his city’s violent history, Dante is about to speak when his attention is suddenly drawn to a bizarre sight: In front of them, stretched out naked and crucified by three stakes to the floor of the bolgia, is a sinner over whom all of the other weighted sinners walk. Catalano informs Dante that this is the shade of JOSEPH CAIAPHAS, high priest of the Sanhedrin under Pontius Pilate, who persuaded the rest of the council that it was expedient for Jesus to die. Now

64 Inferno he bears for all eternity the weight of every hypocrite in this bolgia. Catalano tells the poets that Caiaphas’s father-in-law, Annas, and the other members of that ill-fated Sanhedrin undergo the same punishment, stretched out in other parts of this bolgia. Virgil, a citizen of pre-Christian Rome, has stopped dead in his tracks and stares in amazement at the crucified Caiaphas (since his last trip through these circles occurred before the Crucifixion of Christ, Virgil has not seen this striking sight before). Finally shaking off his astonishment, Virgil asks the friar where he and Dante might find an intact bridge by which to cross to the seventh bolgia. Catalano tells him that every bridge across bolgia six is in ruins, but that close by are the crumbled remains of one bridge that the poets may be able to climb up without much difficulty. Virgil smolders in anger at this, realizing that Malacoda had lied to him about there being an intact bridge the poets could cross from bolgia five. Catalano, however, is not surprised, recalling the proverb that the devil is the father of lies. The canto ends as Virgil strides off in anger, followed by Dante, whose admiration for the Latin poet is unabated. Virgil’s anger rather quickly dissipates, as Dante describes in an elaborate epic simile that opens Canto 24: As the warming sun melts a chilling frost on a pasture, Virgil’s countenance turns pleasant again. Now the poets begin to climb the rocky ruins of the crumbled bridge, their only passage into the seventh bolgia. Virgil gives Dante all the help he can, but the climb takes its toll on the pilgrim, and by the time they reach the top of the sixth ditch, Dante is exhausted and sits down to rest and catch his breath. But Virgil urges him to keep moving, for they still have a long way to go. The Latin poet tries to goad Dante on by appealing to his desire for fame (demonstrating, once again, his pagan value system). This seems to inspire the pilgrim, who snaps to with some enthusiasm. Now the poets cross the bridge over the seventh bolgia and from the top of its arch look down into that chasm from the far bank. From this vantage point they can hear a confused cry from the darkness below but can make out no shapes. Dante asks

Virgil to take him down into the pit, and Virgil agrees. Once in the pit itself, the poets observe a scene full of monstrous serpents and naked, fleeing sinners. Some of the snakes are curled about the sinners’ hands, tying them together behind their backs and knotting them about the loins. Other serpents chase the shades, who run about madly with nowhere to hide. These are the thieves. As the poets watch, one serpent catches a fleeing sinner and attaches its fangs to the sinner’s neck. Immediately the shade bursts into flames and is reduced to ashes. But just as suddenly, the ashes—like those of the phoenix—painfully reshape themselves once more into the form of a man. The reformed shade looks about himself in bewilderment, sighing with anguish, and Virgil asks the sinner who he is. The shade identifies himself as VANNI FUCCI, a Tuscan contemporary of Dante who was known as “the Beast of Pistoia.” Since Fucci was generally known as a man of violence, Dante is curious why he is here among the thieves rather than in circle seven, among the violent. Fucci, his shade reddening with shame, is reluctant to tell his story but seems unable to resist Dante’s question. He reveals that it was he who stole sacred items from the sacristy of Pistoia’s Church of San Zeno—even though an innocent man was convicted of the theft. The poets soon learn that Fucci’s shame is not over the sin he committed but over Dante’s seeing him in this miserable condition—and the knowledge that Dante will report what he has seen back in TUSCANY. In revenge Fucci—with the foresight of the damned that we have seen previously in Ciacco, Farinata, and Brunetto Latini—issues a veiled but disturbing prophecy about coming strife in Florence between White and Black Guelphs (a party split that began in Fucci’s native Pistoia). A bolt from Mars will cause a violent storm, so that none of Dante’s White party will escape unharmed, Fucci asserts, adding as a final sting that he has told Dante this deliberately to hurt him. Canto 25 opens with Vanni Fucci’s last words: Having taunted Dante with his prophecy, he now turns his vile invective against God himself, shaping his fists into “figs” (an obscene Italian gesture) and thrusting them toward the sky as an insult to

Inferno God. After this Dante is actually pleased to see the serpents of that bolgia wrap themselves around Fucci. Nowhere in Hell, the pilgrim asserts, had he seen the equivalent of Fucci’s blasphemy—not even from Capaneus, the chief blasphemer of circle seven (Canto 14). Encircled by two snakes, Fucci flees from the poets’ side, pursued by a centaur who gallops in, his back covered with serpents and a fire-breathing dragon. Virgil explains to Dante that this is CACUS, who is not with the other centaurs (guarding the violent in the river of blood in Canto 12) because of his theft of Hercules’ cattle. When Cacus gallops off, three other thieves (who turn out to be Florentines called Agnello, Buoso, and PUCCIO GALIGAÍ [SCIANCATO]), call out to Dante and Virgil, asking who they are. Before the poets can answer, one of

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the shades wonders aloud where the sinner called Cianfa has gone. Suddenly a six-footed reptile (who proves to be Cianfa) leaps upon the shade called Agnello and entwines itself about him. As Dante watches aghast, the two beings melt into one another like hot wax. The other two shades call to the melting one that he is no longer himself. A new creature emerges, made of the amalgamation of reptile and man, and quickly darts off like a lizard. Just then a small serpent (who proves to be another Florentine, Guercio) leaps up and bites one of the other two sinners and then, as the two stare at each other as if in some hypnotic trance, they begin to metamorphose in a swirl of smoke, each taking on the shape of the other: The man’s legs meld together while the snake’s tail splits apart, the

The serpent attacks Buoso de’ Donati, from Canto 25 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

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man’s skin becomes scaly while the snake’s softens, the man’s ears flatten and merge into his head as the snake grows his own, and so on. The newly formed snake now slithers off, while the new man gloats that Buoso will now be forced to crawl just as he had. Having now witnessed the full contrapasso of the circle of thieves, Dante the poet expresses the wish that his language has done justice to the surreal scene he has described. He also mentions that he has recognized the sinners, including FRANCESCO DEI CAVALCANTI (known as Guerco)—the new man who emerged from the snake that attacked Buoso—and Puccio Sciancato, the only one of the three original thieves to keep his own shape. Dante opens Canto 26 with a bitter invective against his native city. With biting sarcasm he addresses Florence, saying that her fame is so widespread that even in Hell five of her prominent citizens can be found here in the bolgia of thieves. He goes on to say that his early morning dreams (believed to be likely to come true) portend disaster for the city and expresses a desire to see those dreams come true. Now with Virgil’s help the pilgrim climbs up the boulders that lead back up to the bridge arching over the eighth bolgia. From here he sees in the darkness of the next ditch countless flickering flames that remind him of fireflies that a peasant might view from a hillside in the early evening. Virgil explains that within each flame is the soul of a sinner, burning in punishment. Dante replies that he had suspected as much and asks Virgil who is within the nearby flame with its tip split into two separate tongues. Virgil tells him that this flame engulfs a pair of sinners, Ulysses and DIOMEDES, united in death and eternal punishment as they were united in their hatching of devious schemes in life. In particular among other acts associated with the Trojan War (the theft of the Palladium from Troy, the uncovering of Achilles’ disguise that forced him to join the Greek army), they are damned here for the stratagem of the Trojan horse, by which the Greeks were able to topple Troy and set in motion the events that, in Virgil’s account of history, led to the founding of Rome by Trojan descendants, and the subsequent history of Italy.

Dante, thrilled at the idea of speaking with these greatest of classical heroes, asks Virgil whether that is possible. Virgil commends Dante for his request but advises the pilgrim to let Virgil address them himself, since they might disdain Dante’s words. Approaching the dual flame with the utmost respect, Virgil invokes the pair within by his own Aeneid, which celebrated heroic deeds like theirs, asking that one of them tell the story of how he met his end. At this the greater flame—the one engulfing Ulysses—begins to quiver and murmur like a candle in the wind, and finally words begin to issue from the tongue of flame itself. Over the next 52 lines Ulysses tells the famous story of his final voyage, one of the most famous sections of the Inferno and one that Dorothy Sayers has called the “noblest” section of the poem. When he had left the witch Circe’s island, where he had been detained for a year, Ulysses felt a restless desire to explore the world, to know the totality of human vice and virtue. With a small group of loyal shipmates, he sailed throughout the Mediterranean, until reaching the Pillars of Hercules (modern Gibraltar), beyond which human beings were warned not to travel. Undaunted, Ulysses exhorted his men with their Greek heritage—a heritage that demanded they seek the highest achievements of virtue (i.e., manliness or valor) and knowledge. To sail into the unknown sea beyond Gibraltar was to seek this excellence. With his comrades’ eager assent, Ulysses sailed south into uncharted waters. For five months they sailed, until they saw rising before them the greatest mountain Ulysses had ever imagined. But just as the crew began to celebrate such a great discovery, a strong whirlwind arose from the mountain and spun the ship around three times, finally sinking it under the waves. Ulysses ends his narrative by describing how the sea finally closed over him and his crew. When Ulysses has finished speaking at the opening of Canto 27, the double-flame turns to leave, with Virgil’s permission. But another flame steps forward immediately to address the poets, its tongue murmuring confused sounds. Finally it produces words, addressed to Virgil. The shade within has recognized Virgil’s Lombard accent and burns, he says, to hear of recent events in his home coun-

Inferno try of Romagna (recall that the damned, as Farinata had explained in Canto 10, know the future but know nothing about the present). He is, he says, from the territory known as Montefeltro in that region. As Dante leans forward to hear, Virgil nudges him, saying that since this sinner is Italian, Dante can be the one to speak to him. Dante answers the shade with a summary of the current political situation in Romagna (the area of Italy whose major cities include Rimini, Ravenna, Forlì, Imola, and Faenza). Although never free from the ambitions of tyrants, Dante says, Romagna is currently at peace. Ravenna, he says, is governed by the Polenta family (specifically Guido Vecchio, father of Francesca da Rimini, whom we met in Canto 5). The tyrannical Ordelaffi family rules in Forlì. Rimini is dominated by the Malatesta family, whose father and son Dante calls the Old and New Mastiffs. Imola and Faenza are ruled by the despotic MAINARDO PAGANO DA SUSINANA (OR MAGHINARDO). The city of Cesena, however, is ably ruled by Galasso da Montefeltro. Having answered what the shade requested of him, Dante now asks the soul for his own story. The pilgrim, fresh from Ulysses’ heroic speech, tells the enflamed soul to answer him so that the pilgrim may spread his fame on earth. But the tongue of flame roars at this, then responds that if he thought anyone would ever hear his story, he would not speak at all, but since no one to his knowledge ever returned to the world from this depth, he will answer without fear for his reputation. The sinner, who turns out to be the cunning Ghibelline captain GUIDO DA MONTEFELTRO, says that in life he was a man of arms. He describes his actions as a military leader as those of the fox rather than the lion and says that his craftiness made him famous. Late in life he decided to become a Franciscan friar to atone for his sins—a stratagem that would have worked had it not been for Boniface VIII, whom Guido calls the “prince of the New Pharisees.” Boniface made war not on Saracens or Jews but on fellow Christians—specifically the Colonna family, who opposed Boniface’s election and who were holed up in an apparently impenetrable fortress at Palestrina (25 miles east of Rome). Boniface, Guido says, persuaded him to put aside his

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vows and advise the pope in his war against the Colonna family. Guido was convinced when Boniface asserted that he would absolve Guido of the sin before he committed it. With this assurance Guido offered his evil counsel: Promise much but fulfill little. Guido does not describe the result of his advice, but Dante’s readers would have known the outcome: Boniface promised the Colonna a complete pardon, but once they had surrendered, destroyed Palestrina completely. In the same way Boniface’s promise to Guido proved false: At his death, the shade relates, SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI tried to claim his soul, but a black devil prevented Francis, claiming to have Guido’s name written in his book because of his false counsel. As for the pope’s absolution, the devil claims it is worthless, for no one can repent an act at the same time he is willing it. Thus the devil, through his own cunning rhetorical skills, wins the soul of Guido, taunting him for not realizing that the devil was a logician. When the flame has ceased speaking, Dante and Virgil move on, now to the ninth circle, where the “sowers of discord” are punished. As he looks down into the ninth ditch at the opening of Canto 28, Dante wonders who could do justice to such a scene, for below him, all stumbling in the same direction, are more mutilated bodies than were found on all the battlefields that southern Italy has seen since the time of the Romans. The poets first see the shade of MUHAMMAD, disemboweled by a wound stretching from his chin to his crotch, with his entrails hanging in the dust. Muhammad looks up, displaying his wound as he staggers past. Punished in this bolgia, Muhammad reveals, are the sowers of discord—those who caused schisms in life and here are themselves split apart. Muhammad points out his son-in-law, Ali, walking ahead of him, as Dante illustrates his opinion that, between them, Muhammad and Ali are responsible for the schism in faith between Christianity and Islam. Muhammad goes on to describe how a sword-wielding devil slashes all of the sinners as they walk by, mutilating them according to the degree of their guilt. By the time a sinner completes a circle around this bolgia, his wounds have healed enough for the demon to inflict them again. Thus these sinners are hacked

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Bertran de Born, from Canto 28 of the Inferno, by Gustave Doré. From Dante’s Inferno, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and Illustrated with the Designs of M. Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1885.

to pieces continually, over and over again, through all eternity. Before moving on, Muhammad asks who the poet is who stands watching him. Virgil replies that Dante is one not yet dead, who will be returning to the world. At this Muhammad gives Dante a message to give to Fra Dolcino Torniello of Novara: Stock up on food or he will soon join the sinners here. Fra Dolcino was founder of the sect of Apostolic Brothers, which would be declared heretical by Clement V in 1305 and ultimately be starved into submission in 1307, when Fra Dolcino would be burned at the stake. Scores of the maimed had stopped and looked up at Dante when Virgil announced that the pilgrim was a living man. Several now step forward to address him. The first, Pier da Medicina, tells Dante to warn Guido el Cassero and Angiolello de Carignano, two citizens of the small Adriatic town

of Fano, that they will be thrown off a ship by the treacherous tyrant Malatestino of Rimini so that he can gain control of Fano. Pier also shows Dante the mutilated shade of Gaius Scribonius Curio, who persuaded Caesar to cross the Rubicon and begin the civil war with Pompey—for his actions, Curio’s tongue is hacked off. Another shade, whose hands have been severed, identifies himself as Mosca de’ Lamberti. Mosca was one of the illustrious Florentines Dante had asked Ciacco about in Canto 6. He is in the Hell of the sowers of discord because it was at his instigation that the Guelph-Ghibelline feud was ignited in Florence in 1215 through the murder of the Guelph Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti. Dante quickly rebuffs Mosca, chastising him with the charge that he caused the death of all his family. At this Mosca runs off, mad with pain. Finally Dante and Virgil see the most bizarre sight of all: a decapitated body moving toward them, holding his own head in one hand and swinging it like a lantern. This is the troubadour poet Bertran de Born, who convinced the young Prince Henry of England to rebel against his father, King Henry II. Having separated the political head from the body politic, he now suffers the same fate in his own body. In one of the most memorable images of the entire Comedy, holding his head up at arm’s length to speak more easily to the poets on the bridge, Bertran declares that he is himself the perfect contrapasso. As Dante continues to stare at the mutilated forms of the schismatics at the beginning of Canto 29, Virgil chides him for excessive interest in these wretches and reminds him that time is short. The pilgrim answers that he was searching for one of his own family among the shades. He is referring to Geri del Bello, who had been killed in a blood feud with the Sacchetti family and was as yet unavenged. As Virgil moves on, he tells Dante to think no more about Geri—Virgil had seen him among the throng and had witnessed a threatening gesture he had made at Dante. Dante expresses regret for leaving Geri’s death unavenged. Having arrived at the bridge over the 10th and final bolgia of Malebolge, Dante hears piercing shrieks from the darkness below and is assailed as

Inferno well by a foul stench from the 10th pit. Then from the bank he sees a ditch full of diseased shades, greater in number than the sick at all the hospitals of Tuscany during malaria season. These are the falsifiers, the last sinners among those guilty of simple fraud. They languish in the valley, lying in every imaginable position on the bottom of the ditch and on one another. The shades are afflicted by every imaginable disease, too weak to move and suffering in all of their senses. As the poets move, as usual, to the left along the bank, they see two sinners leaning against each other, scratching madly at their leprous scabs but without relief. Virgil calls down to them, asking whether any Italians are in this bolgia. One of the shades answers that they are Italian themselves but asks who Virgil is. When Virgil answers that he is accompanying Dante, a living man, to show him all of Hell, the two sinners—and several others nearby—turn shakily to look at Dante. Dante promises to keep their memories alive if the shades will tell him their names and where they were from. The first sinner is GRIFFOLINO DA AREZZO, who convinced Alberto da Siena that he could teach him to fly, but when Alberto found he had been tricked, he had Griffolino burned as a magician. But Griffolino asserts he is not in the 10th bolgia for that act, but rather for his alchemy, a form of falsifying. At Griffolino’s story Dante turns to Virgil and asks whether he has ever known anyone as silly as the Sienese. At that the other shade joins Dante in mocking the citizens of Siena, mentioning the foolish members of the Sienese “Spendthrifts’ Club”—Stricca di Giovanni dei Salimbeni, NICCOLÒ DE’ SALIMBENI, Caccia d’Asciano, and a great fool called ABBAGLIATO (i.e., dazed)—who squandered all their inheritances in outrageous acts of excess. The speaker identifies himself as CAPOCCHIO, another alchemist burned alive in 1293 in Siena for practicing alchemy. Capocchio implies that he recognizes Dante, suggesting that the two were acquainted. Early commentators on the Comedy suggest that Dante may have known Capocchio when both men were students. Three other categories of falsifiers—that is, impersonators, counterfeiters, and false witnesses—

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appear in Canto 30, which continues the action of the previous canto from the midst of Capocchio’s speech. The canto begins with a long epic simile touching on the madness of King Athamas of Thebes and of Hecuba after the fall of Troy and declaring that their madness was never so ferocious as that of the two shades who suddenly race into sight. One sinks his teeth into Capocchio and drags him off, but not before Griffolino identifies him as GIANNI SCHICCHI, a notorious Florentine impersonator. The other insane shade Griffolino names as MYRRHA, who in disguise committed incest with her father, King Cinyras of Cyprus. When the mad impersonators have run off, Dante turns his attention to the other shades in the bolgia. He first sees the misshapen body of MASTER ADAM. Suffering from dropsy, his bloated body is shaped like a lute, his legs are weak and useless, and he complains chiefly of an unquenchable thirst. He is condemned to this bolgia as a counterfeiter, having falsified gold florins at the instigation of the Counts Guidi of Romena. Although tormented by thirst, he so blames the counts for his damnation that he says he would exchange a fountain of water for the sight of one of them being tortured in this ditch. He knows one is already there, and he wishes that he could move even slightly, so that he could inch his way along the 11-mile circumference of this bolgia to find him and see his suffering. Dante asks Adam who the two sinners are who lie close to him, and Adam identifies them as Potiphar’s wife, who falsely accused Joseph (Genesis 39.6–18), and the Greek SINON, whose lying words convinced the Trojans to open their gates and take Ulysses’ wooden horse into the city. The two false witnesses lie in burning fevers that give them a foul odor. Sinon, angered at being so introduced, strikes Adam in his swollen belly with a fist, and Adam answers him with a blow to the face. The two shades begin bickering. Adam curses Sinon for his lying words to the Trojans, while Sinon says that his sin was one act while Adam sinned with every individual coin he counterfeited. The two souls begin to curse one another while Dante listens, fascinated. Virgil suddenly breaks in, chiding Dante for listening to such vulgar squabbling and threatening

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to lose his patience. The pilgrim, shamed, does not know what to say. But Virgil, seeing the degree of his repentance, forgives him, telling him to remember in the future that listening to this kind of talk is degrading. Virgil’s forgiving words soothe Dante’s contrite soul as the two turn their backs on the final ditch of Malebolge and begin making their way through dim light toward Hell’s final circle. Dante can see nothing through the dim air but suddenly hears the deafening blast of a horn, more ominous, he says, than the sound of Roland’s horn at Roncevalles. When he looks in the direction of the sound, he begins to make out the shapes of what seem to be high towers, and he asks Virgil what city they are approaching. These are not towers, Virgil says, but giants, standing waist-deep in Hell’s final pit. As he

Antaeus sets down Dante and Virgil in the ninth circle, from Canto 31 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

approaches closer, the pilgrim sees this for himself: The heads and chests of several giants are visible above the cliff overlooking the ninth circle. As they draw close to one, Dante can make out his face and see that his upper torso rises above the bank to the height of three tall men standing atop one another. The giant tries to speak but his words are gibberish, and Virgil tells his ward that this is NIMROD, builder of the Tower of Babel (in medieval lore). Because of his pride humankind has no common language, and therefore he speaks words no one can understand; nor can he fathom the speech of anyone else. The poets move on to find a more approachable giant. They walk to the left a good distance before reaching Ephialtes, who rebelled against Jove. He is wound about with heavy chains. Dante says that he would like to see Briareus, a Titan who joined in the war against Jupiter. Virgil says he is farther off and bound just as Ephialtes is, at which the chained giant shakes like an earthquake. The frightened Dante moves on with Virgil to Antaeus, another Titan but one who did not join the rebellion against Jove. Virgil addresses the giant with great respect, requesting that Antaeus lift the poets down to the ice that forms the ninth circle at the bottom of this cliff—at the same time telling the giant that the living Dante is still able to spread Antaeus’s fame in the world. Without a word the giant lifts Virgil in his hands, and Virgil calls to Dante to grab hold of him. Comparing the bending giant to Garisenda, a leaning tower in Bologna, Dante expresses fear at the great height, but Antaeus puts the poets down gently in the pit and immediately stands up again like the mast of a ship. Commentary In Italian male means “evil,” while the word bolgia means both “pouch” and “ditch.” Dante seems to have chosen the term carefully because he wanted to suggest both meanings. The rounds of circle eight are certainly ditches or trenches that run concentrically around the central well. But the imagery of a pouch—a purse full of ill-gotten money—is also suggested, since the fraud committed by most of the sinners in this circle was motivated by greed. Dante spends the greater portion of the Inferno—some 13

Inferno cantos in all—describing the sins and punishments of this circle. Ten groups of sinners are punished here: the panderers and seducers, the flatterers, the simonists, the sorcerers, the grafters, the hypocrites, the thieves, the evil counselors, the sowers of discord, and the counterfeiters. These sins are categorized as simple fraud—that is, fraud without the complicating addition of malicious treachery, for those sins are punished deeper down in the well, in the ninth circle. The contrapasso involved in the punishment of the panderers and seducers relates to the fact that both sets of sinners used women virtually as slaves for their own purposes. Thus they were merciless in driving their victims to do their bidding. Now for all eternity the sinners are driven by the whips of horned devils, so that the users have become the used, the drivers become the driven. On a moral level the devils themselves may suggest the goading of the sinners’ own guilty memories. The long lines of sinners moving in both directions remind the pilgrim of the crowds in Rome during the jubilee year of 1300 proclaimed by Dante’s great enemy Boniface VIII. It is interesting to note that at the precise time of the fictional date of the Comedy—Easter weekend of 1300—crowds of people were in fact walking in both directions on the Ponte Castello Sant’ Angelo across the Tiber in Rome, being herded by authorities toward Saint Peter’s in one direction and toward Monte Giordano in the other. One notable difference between this eighth circle and the circles above is that the sinners’ concern with their earthly reputations is virtually gone. The souls this deep in Hell want only to be forgotten, so that from this point on it becomes much more difficult for Dante to persuade sinners to talk to him about their misdeeds. The first sinner he recognizes here, Venedico Caccianemico, attempts to hide from Dante’s gaze, hoping not to be recognized. Of course he does not want his pandering of his own sister to be remembered by posterity. But perhaps the shame of these sinners in Lower Hell simply shows them to be less self-deceived than those in Upper Hell—Brunetto Latini, for example—who seem to believe that their eternal damnation is of less consequence than their temporal reputation.

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This makes Virgil’s attitude toward the seducer Jason all the more questionable. It is curious that Virgil’s admiration of Jason has not sparked more scholarly comment, for this deep in Hell it seems incongruous for the pilgrim’s guide to revere one of the sinners, even if it is a classical hero the stature of Jason. But Dante the poet understood Virgil’s commitment to pagan Stoic philosophy, the prevailing worldview of patrician Romans of his time. Indeed, Virgil’s Aeneas is the literary embodiment of Stoicism: the sage who sees passions as the product of faulty judgments and follows logic and duty oblivious to the vicissitudes of Fortune. As the poets stand and look back from the ancient bridge that crosses the bolgia (which Dante calls, ironically, the vecchio ponte, like the famous Ponte Vecchio that bridged the Arno in Florence), Virgil expresses his high regard for Jason’s “regal aspect” as he walks with apparent disregard for his pain. Such lapses on Virgil’s part suggest that his classical humanistic values still drive his ethical judgment. Admirable in themselves, such values do not include what Dante would regard as higher Christian morality. This clarifies why Virgil’s home of Limbo lies not outside but within the gates of Hell. The fate of the flatterers in the next bolgia is humorous and scatological. The language of this canto, and of several others in the Inferno, would clearly be out of place in the Paradiso or even the Purgatorio, but Dante adapts his diction to his subject, and despite Virgil’s veneration of the regal Jason, Dante shows us immediately that Hell is no place of refinement or courtliness. While flattery may seem at first to be a relatively small vice, not meriting an eternity so deep in Hell, it is important to remember the consequences of flattery: Sycophantic flatterers who surround a prince or powerful lord and feed him nothing but flattering lies rather than honest counsel may lead him into tyranny, ill-advised war, and foolish vanity, leading a country to ruin. The appropriate punishment for flatterers is to immerse them in filthy waste, the physical embodiment of their valueless words. As Canto 19 opens, the reader is struck by a jarring new prophetic tone in the narrative voice. Certainly the voice of Dante the poet, this voice is also presented as that of the pilgrim Dante,

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Inferno

The Simoniac Pope, from Canto 19 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National ArtCollections Fund, 1922.

reacting with righteous indignation to the evils of simony that he has witnessed in Hell and that he recognizes are eating away the foundations of the church. Thus the narrator’s condemnation of Simon Magus is a heartfelt condemnation of the sin of simony itself. Dante would have known the legend of Simon Magus not only from the book of Acts but also from an apocryphal text called The Acts of Peter and Paul, in which Simon Magus challenges the disciples to a flying match. In a story paralleling the myths of Icarus and Phaeton alluded to in Canto 17, Simon crashed headfirst to the ground when Saint Peter crossed himself. There may be an allusion to this legend in the punishment of the simoniacs, whose heads are thrust into the earth. The simo-

niac popes’ upside-down positions may also mimic Saint Peter’s own martyrdom, when he was crucified upside-down—thus the successors of Simon Peter spend eternity in a grotesque parody of the apostle’s martyrdom because of their devotion to the incorrect Simon. The fire that burns the soles of their feet probably also parodies the descent of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2.3 as tongues of flame over the heads of Peter and the other apostles (Scott 303). All of this complements the more obvious contrapasso of the bolgia, wherein the distorted position of the sinners turned upside-down in mock baptismal fonts and the baptism by fire on their feet rather than the baptism by water on the head mirror their perversion of holy sacraments, and hence the church itself. It is in this vein that we are probably intended to read the curious autobiographical insertion about the incident in Florence’s San Giovanni baptistery: Apparently during one particular baptism, a child had become stuck in one of the fonts and to save the child from drowning, Dante had broken the vessel to release the child, an act for which, according to his account in this canto, Dante was accused by some of sacrilege. Most critics have taken this insertion at face value and assumed that Dante, concerned with clearing his reputation, simply took this opportunity to explain his actions. Others have added that here, as in some of the previous circles, Dante is concerned with the moral level of the allegory and is depicting himself as participating in the sin of simony in a curious way, in the only way a layman could. Pushing this further, it becomes clear that what is important here is not Dante’s justification of his action but his action itself as a metaphor for the sin of simony, which breaks and destroys the church just as Dante’s action physically broke the baptismal font and physically damaged the church. The chief sinner of this bolgia is Nicholas III, who, because of his greater power and responsibility, endures greater suffering than the other simoniacs. Writing these verses in perhaps 1309, Dante the poet was well aware that his own mortal enemy, Boniface VIII, was still alive at the time of the fictional date of the Comedy (Easter weekend in 1300), but he also knew that Boniface would die in 1303. Dante the pilgrim, confronted by the strange words

Inferno of Nicholas, who mistakes him for Boniface arriving three years early, stands astounded at what was certainly intended as a grimly humorous and ironic misunderstanding. Certainly the poet was taking this opportunity to strike at a political and personal enemy, and in retrospect the poet knew that Boniface would not repent or change his ways in the three years between his poem’s setting and Boniface’s death. Nevertheless a grim theological question is raised by this scene: Is the fate of Boniface, or Pope Clement V, whom Nicholas also expects, already sealed? Does Nicholas’s foreknowledge preclude the free will of Boniface or Clement to repent and ultimately save his soul from damnation? Are some sins simply irreversible once committed? Or is the foreknowledge of the damned faulty? These are questions that will become more pressing and more difficult as Dante moves deeper into Hell. As for Clement it is clear that the first draft of this canto must have been written during his Avignon papacy (1305–14), and the question of whether Dante actually published this portion of the canto during Clement’s lifetime is a difficult one. Even for Dante it was a bold stroke to place a reigning pope in Hell, though Dante never mentions Clement (nor any of the other popes in this bolgia) by name, calling him only a “lawless shepherd” from “the West” (Clement was from Gascony). Certainly Dante had no way of knowing, in 1309, how long Clement would occupy the papal seat, yet he has Nicholas suggest an approximate timeline for Clement’s supplanting of Boniface in the place of torment, suggesting that Boniface would be in this position for a shorter time than Nicholas himself had been (ll. 79–81). It seems likely that Dante returned to the Inferno to make revisions while he worked on the Purgatorio, and that he did not make final changes to this canto until after Clement’s death in 1314. As the canto opened with an apostrophe of condemnation addressed to Simon Magus, it reaches its conclusion with the pilgrim Dante’s address to Nicholas, in the form of a long rhetorical harangue—the first such formal speech by the pilgrim in the Inferno. Dante begins by equating the corrupted church (l. 106) with the Whore of Babylon described in Revelation 17, corrupted by

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fornication with the kings of the earth (as Clement was by Philip the Fair). The seven heads of the beast she rides represent, for Dante, the seven sacraments of the church, and the beast’s 10 horns the 10 commandments (Dante will return to this interpretation in Purgatorio 32). The pilgrim ends his sermon to the pope with another apostrophe, this one to Constantine the Great, Roman emperor from 306 to 337. According to medieval belief it was Constantine (baptized in 312) who first granted wealth and secular power to the church. Suffering from leprosy (so the story goes), Constantine was told by his pagan advisers to bathe in the blood of infants. Recoiling from such an abomination, the emperor approached POPE SYLVESTER I, who washed Constantine’s skin in holy water and thereby cured his disease. In gratitude for his healing the emperor made what became known as the Donation of Constantine. Moving his own capital to Constantinople, the emperor’s Donation granted the pope secular authority over all the Western Empire. This document—proved to be an eighth-century forgery by the Renaissance humanist scholar Lorenzo Valla—was unquestioned in the later Middle Ages and provided Roman popes the legal justification for their secular territorial claims. In his apostrophe Dante expresses the wish that the Donation had never been made, since it was the power and wealth provided by the imperial grant that led to the current greed and corruption within the church. The symbolic retribution of the soothsayers in Canto 20 is fairly obvious: In life the fortune tellers strained to see into the future, beyond the limits of human vision. Now in eternity they can only look backward and see only through eyes blurred by tears. It is the sight of their distorted bodies, their heads grotesquely twisted backward on their necks, that causes the pilgrim to weep as well, for pity’s sake. But Dante’s tears provoke Virgil’s anger. This is the first difficulty of the canto: Here the pilgrim, fresh from his outraged verbal assault on Nicholas III and the sin of simony in the previous canto, seems to slide backward into the kind of sympathy he felt earlier for sinners like Francesca in the second circle. Virgil, who reacted so warmly to that

74 Inferno rebuke by taking Dante in his arms, here scolds Dante harshly for his reversion. This is the first time Virgil has seriously rebuked Dante for these feelings. One explanation for Virgil’s reaction here is that in this canto, rather than expressing pity for an individual sinner like Francesca or Ciacco, Dante seems to question the form of God’s punishment itself. In a reprimand that puns on the words pity and piety, which in Italian are the same word (pietà), Virgil tells Dante that in Hell, pity must die so that piety may live. Dante’s pity is improper because it questions, even second-guesses, God’s universal plan. Virgil goes on to explain the true nature of divination. It is an attempt to see into God’s plan in order to avoid it or shape it to human will. Thus Dante’s pity for the sinners of this bolgia is his way of engaging in the sin punished in this canto. Virgil’s account also explains why, for example, no Old Testament prophets appear in this bolgia. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, they were sent by God himself to reveal his plan to the people. The prophets were doing God’s will, not trying to bend it. Besides it is important to remember that all of Malebolge is a circle of fraud: The kind of augury associated with necromancy or paganism (rather than true religion) is at best misguided and at worst sheer hucksterism. What complicates Virgil’s response, however, is his own medieval reputation as a magician as well as a prophet (the latter because of his supposed prediction of the birth of Christ in his Fourth Eclogue). It was in fact a common practice in the Middle Ages to augur the future by selecting random passages out of Virgil’s writing (a custom known as sortes Virgilianae). It may be to allay that reputation that Virgil elects to tell in this canto the rather lengthy story of the founding of his native city of Mantua. That description—Virgil’s longest single speech in the Inferno—seems to most readers a digression and has been variously explained by commentators, though there is no scholarly consensus on the subject. Perhaps the most popular explanation is that Dante, aware of Virgil’s reputation, wants to exonerate him of any suspicion of necromancy by allowing him to dissociate his native city—and

by extension himself—from any connection with divination. Thus he has Virgil change the version found in the Aeneid (where Manto’s son names the city after her) to one in which unrelated people from the area built the town at the place where Manto had previously lived. Virgil may have in mind the ancient custom whereby a newly founded city was named by a kind of divination through the casting of lots. Mantua, he says, was founded in no such manner. The fact that Dante has the pilgrim Virgil contradict the poet Virgil’s own account adds another difficulty to the passage. Some have suggested that it is Dante’s way, once again, of demonstrating the limits of the pagan poet’s knowledge at the same time he is defending his master against the charge of necromancy. More important may be the link this matter provides between this Canto and the previous one. In Canto 19 Dante insists upon telling the true story of his breaking of the baptismal font at San Giovanni, at the same time illustrating the nature of simony, which undermines and breaks up the church. Here Virgil is concerned with correcting the previous story of Mantua and revealing the truth. Virgil ends his long speech expressing a desire that truth be told without contamination, a comment that reveals and condemns the true nature of augury, which involves fraud, the contamination of truth by falsehood. Canto 20 ends with one more curious section, in which Virgil describes to Dante in some detail the precise position of the moon in the heavens, which reveals (as scholars have calculated) that it is now 6:00 A.M. on Holy Saturday, time for the poets to move on. Virgil’s interest in the spheres, as well as his ability to divine their movements from this deep under the earth, suggests a knowledge of astrology that would have been expected of Michael Scott or one of the other sinners in this bolgia. But Virgil has already dissociated himself from magical augury, and in this case Virgil’s knowledge—like that of the Old Testament prophets—seems to originate in direct divine inspiration. Cantos 21 and 22 of the Inferno, both concerned with bolgia five, have traditionally been referred to as the “gargoyle cantos.” If, as some early scholars suggested, the entire Commedia is structured like a

Inferno Gothic cathedral, then certainly it is in these cantos that Dante places his grotesqueries. It is here that Dante the poet uses his coarsest language in the poem. The bizarre behavior of the hideous devils and the grossly comic manner in which Canto 21 ends make these cantos farcical in contrast to the generally high seriousness of the rest of the Inferno. Part of the comedy of these verses is apparently a burlesque of the military, whose rituals seem to be satirized in the crude salutes of the martial demons, the Malabranche. This military imagery is introduced when Dante compares himself, walking among the fierce demons, to Pisan soldiers at Caprona. In 1289 Dante had taken part in the siege of the fortress of Caprona near PISA. When Pisan troops from the fortress surrendered to the Florentine and Luccan Guelphs, they had to pass among the enemy, no doubt as gingerly as the pilgrim Dante passed among the fierce Malabranche. Whatever his reasons Dante gives more space to bolgia five than to any other place in Hell. It is possible that the reason for Dante’s special interest in the bolgia of the grafters or barraters is that the sinners here are guilty of the very crimes Dante himself had been charged with, and for which he was exiled from Florence. Indeed the trumped-up charges that Dante misused his influence in public office for his own monetary gain prevented Dante from ever returning to his home city on pain of death. Only in this canto does Virgil make Dante hide—perhaps because Dante is in more danger here than anywhere else. His participation in this sin meant, for Dante, a death sentence. It may be, too, that the accusations of Dante’s own graft explain the vulgar humor of the canto. Perhaps it represents Dante’s opinion of the charges against him, and just how seriously they should be taken. The contrapasso in this bolgia is rather complex: The grafters spend eternity in sticky pitch, reflecting their own sticky fingers. As their deeds were done in secret, away from the light of day, so they must remain hidden in the dark pitch. As the devils try to spear sinners in the pitch with their grappling hooks, like cooks with a stew, so the grafters sought for their victims among the people, for whom they cared no more than for pieces of meat.

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One of the remarkable aspects of Canto 21 is its importance in determining the fictional date of the Comedy. When Malacoda tells the poets that the bridge over the sixth bolgia was destroyed by the earthquake that shook Hell, he says that that cataclysm occurred precisely 1,266 years ago as of yesterday, five hours later than the current time. Since we know from Virgil’s comments in Canto 12 that the earthquake occurred shortly before Christ harrowed Hell, it is clear that the quake alluded to is that which, according to the gospels, shook the earth at the moment of Christ’s death. Since in Dante’s time this was believed to have occurred at precisely noon on Good Friday in 34 C.E., that would mean that the previous day, the day on which the Inferno began, would have been Good Friday in the year 1300. Further the precise moment that Dante and Virgil are spending with Malacoda in Canto 21 must be five hours before noon (i.e., 7:00 A.M.) on Holy Saturday—in 1300, that date would have been April 9. As Canto 21 ends, Dante’s reluctance to trust the demons, and Virgil’s overruling of his ward, are noteworthy. What we see in Virgil in this canto is a confidence in the face of demonic powers that he was unable to muster at the walls of Dis in Canto 9. But his confidence here is misguided. As it turns out, Dante is correct not to trust Malacoda or his troops. The pilgrim has grown in his understanding of sin and its deceptive nature, so that here his understanding surpasses that of his master. If Virgil here is the allegorical representation of human reason, perhaps this incident suggests the fallibility of human reason when confronted with the blatant lies of the truly evil. Perhaps it is only a gut feeling, like that displayed here by Dante, that can detect such mendacity. Dante begins Canto 22 in a mock-heroic style, in which he considers with apparent seriousness Malacoda’s buglelike fart as a legitimate military salute. The usual effect of the mock-heroic (as in Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” for example) is the creation of humor through the juxtaposition of the trivial with the significant. Thus part of Dante’s purpose here seems to be the trivialization of the sinners and the demons in this bolgia. Much of Dante’s Hell is full of horrors, but here he implies

76 Inferno that the damned—sinners and demons alike—are essentially ridiculous. Without God these characters have no real claim to respect. Ultimately the devil is an ass. The chief event of Canto 22, the tricking of the demons by the anonymous Navarrese grafter, is puzzling to some readers. The incident does nothing to advance the plot of the Inferno—we already know who the sinners are and what their punishment is—so the incident of the Navarrese seems an extraneous episode included chiefly to increase the comic effect of the canto. However, there is more to this episode. The sinner from Navarre, about whom we know nothing more than what he tells us in this canto, demonstrates that he (like all of Hell’s inhabitants) is in death precisely what he was in life. The sin of graft or barratry is a sin of concealment, comprising dealings that take place illicitly, in secret—thus the Navarrese tells us very little about himself, even keeping his name a secret (some early commentators have given him the name of Ciampolo, but nothing in the text provides this identification). As barratry is a sin of fraud, the Navarrese engages in fraud to deceive the demons. Further barratry is a sin against society: It might even be called a treasonous act, since those guilty of the sin have betrayed the public trust in the positions to which they have been appointed. Thus the Navarrese offers to betray his fellow sinners in order to (literally) to save his own skin. Similarly the Malebranche themselves are distrustful of one another and engage in acts of deceit and treachery among their own group. Calcabrina, from the beginning of the encounter with the Navarrese, is looking for an excuse to fight with Alichino, and he takes that opportunity even at the expense of his group’s common good. Thus the guardians of this bolgia, like the sinners themselves, are selfish, deceptive, and treacherous—three aspects of the sin of barratry. Far from being superfluous, the incident of the Navarrese grafter is a demonstration of the sin in action. The fable referred to in the beginning of Canto 23 was in fact not one of Aesop’s, though it was attributed to him during the Middle Ages. In the fable a mouse arrives at a river and, unable to

cross on his own, asks for help from a frog. The frog, bearing some inexplicable ill will toward the mouse, agrees and ties the mouse to his leg with a long string, supposedly to prevent him from falling off. But after swimming out to the middle of the river, the frog dives below the water in an attempt to drown the mouse, who, tied to the frog’s leg, cannot escape. The mouse fights bravely against the frog until a passing hawk catches sight of him, swoops down, and snatches the mouse up in his claws. Thus the frog, still tied to the mouse by the string, is carried away as well, both of them to be devoured by the hawk. The lesson of the story is that those who seek to harm others will themselves be destroyed. Another version of the fable with which Dante may have been familiar occurs in the 12th-century collection by the French poet Marie de France. In Marie’s version the mouse escapes from the hawk, and only the frog is devoured. Dante says that the brawl he has just witnessed at the end of Canto 22 reminds him of this fable, asserting that the beginning and ending of the fable and the fight are exactly alike. But what Dante suggests is obvious has puzzled commentators for nearly 700 years. Just how the Navarrese grafter’s squabble with the Malebranche parallels the fable of the frog and the mouse is a matter of some debate. Some readers have assumed that Arlichino is the mouse and Calcabrina the frog, but since the mouse in the fable is completely innocent, it is hard to see the demon Arlichino in that light. Besides in that scenario who would be the hawk? Another relatively recent suggestion is that the two innocent poets, looking for safe passage across the sixth bolgia, are like the mouse, and the Malebranche represent the frog—like the frog of the fable, they come to a bad end. If Dante has in mind Marie’s version of the tale, the poets escape just as the mouse does in the end. But as Charles Singleton points out in his edition, when Dante the pilgrim makes this comparison at the beginning of Canto 23, he does not yet know that the Malacoda have deceived them, so a comparison of them with the deceitful frog at this point loses its significance. Perhaps the explanation that best fits the fable is that the Navarrese grafter represents the mouse (he is clearly not innocent, but in this instance he

Inferno does not seek to harm the devils). Arlichino may then be the frog, eager to destroy the Navarrese, and the other demon, Calacabrina, may be the hawk, pouncing on the frog while the mouse escapes. Of course this interpretation is not perfect either, since, unlike the hawk, Calacabrina ends up in the boiling pitch along with the characters of the mouse and frog. Perhaps the only thing that really works is the application of the moral to the situation: Those who seek to harm others have a bad end—although of course Dante and Virgil, who have sought to harm no one, are equally endangered here by the angry Malebranche. The punishment of the hypocrites of bolgia six is manifestly appropriate, reflecting the hypocrites’ sin of hiding their true intentions behind a false front that they show to the world. The elaborately gilded monks’ robes here hide the coarse and heavy weight within behind a pleasant façade. The monks’ robes anticipate the two Jovial Friars with whom Dante converses later in the canto—members of a sect infamous for its hypocrisy, as its members took religious vows but lived in luxury and sensuality. Further the hypocrites’ punishment seems to recall Christ’s attack on the hypocrisy of the Pharisees in Matthew 23.27, where he calls them “whitewashed tombs”—beautiful on the outside but inwardly filled with filth. This may well anticipate the Jews whom Dante places as the chief sinners of this bolgia—the crucified Caiaphas and other members of the Sanhedrin who condemned Jesus. Though they would probably have been Sadducees, Dante may well have associated Caiaphas and the others with the hypocritical Pharisees whom Christ condemned as whited sepulchers. Canto 23 ends with Virgil’s discovery that, contrary to what the demon Malacoda told him at the end of the last canto, all the bridges over bolgia six are shattered. Thus the action that began with the poets’ entrance into bolgia five at the beginning of Canto 21 has finally reached a conclusion here three cantos later and, as Mark Musa has argued in his edition of the poem (2, 311–312), the whole action of these cantos turns on a series of lies or deceptions (Malacoda’s lie to Virgil, the Navarrese’s lie to the Malebranche, Calcabrina’s hidden malice and plotting against Arlichino, the

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lies of Catalano and Loderingo to the people of Florence, the lies of Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin to the Romans and the Jews), thus underscoring the fact that lies and hypocrisy are at the heart of the sin of fraud itself. Virgil seems particularly fallible in these cantos, from his trusting acceptance of the demonic escort in Canto 21 (over Dante’s objections) to his fuming anger at his own mistaken trust at the end of Canto 23. Allegorically this may suggest how difficult it is for human reason alone to recognize malicious fraud, particularly when that fraud is in the guise of truth. The eyes of Reason alone cannot penetrate the gilded robes of hypocrisy and deceit. But of course Virgil is also angry at Catalano at the end of Canto 23: Catalano’s implication that

Dante and Virgil escape from the devils, from Canto 23 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

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Inferno

Virgil should have known better than to trust the father of lies is sarcastic and biting, and Virgil may feel some understandable pique at being lectured in the ethics of mendacity by a damned sinner. No wonder he stalks off at the end of the canto. And no wonder the pilgrim still expresses admiration for him, despite his very human errors. Of particular note in Canto 24 is Virgil’s exhortation to the flagging Dante after the poets have climbed the ruins of the bridge over the sixth bolgia. He advises the poet to apply the strength of his soul to overcome his fatigue. By such strength of will, he reminds Dante, men achieve fame—the one way to leave a permanent mark on the world, rather than the “smoke in wind and foam upon the water” (24. l. 51) that is all that lesser mortals leave. Since, as Musa points out, these two cantos focusing on the thieves are two of Dante’s most poetically ambitious cantos (2.317), it might well be argued that the poet is here highly focused on the way to enhance his poetic reputation, and so is particularly concerned about his own fame at this point. On the other hand it is difficult to forget the lessons of circle seven. The respect and honor that the pilgrim showed in those cantos to Brunetto Latini (Canto 15) because of his scholarly reputation and to the aristocratic warrior-sodomites Jacopo, Guido, and Tegghiaio (Canto 16) because of their martial exploits were in the end misplaced—these figures are, after all, damned. Remember, too, that Virgil is clearly not infallible—his misplaced trust of Malacoda in Canto 21 is the most recent evidence of that. Virgil’s expressed admiration for the seducer Jason in Canto 18 should also be kept in mind: As a classical pagan Stoic Virgil admired the greatness of heart that allowed Jason to disdain the pains of Hell. This is precisely the kind of spirit he exhorts Dante to display when he urges him to rise and move on. As in Milton’s Lycidas, fame in the Inferno may be the “last infirmity of noble mind,” and Virgil here is urging what Dante may be learning to reject: Fame for its own sake means nothing. An act’s only value lies in whether it pleases God, not in how it affects one’s reputation with other people. A case in point is the presentation of Vanni Fucci in this canto. Like the earlier Brunetto, Fucci is concerned with what people think of him back

in Florence, and Fucci, apparently proud of his reputation as a man of violence as the “Beast,” is ashamed at having Dante catch him among the thieves, knowing that the poet will report it among the living. As with others in Hell, Fucci’s earthly reputation means more to him than his damnation. But in a true undercutting of that attitude, Dante makes it clear that Fucci’s reputation is that of an assassin and plunderer. Fame in itself is not worth having. Fucci’s prophecy, the fourth in the Inferno spoken by one of the shades, is the most complex so far. Spoken deliberately in order to make Dante suffer, it is clearly a negative prediction of the poet’s future. But the details of the prophecy, at least after the first two lines, are obscure. In lines 143–144, Fucci says that Pistoia will be emptied of Blacks, and that Florence will change its citizens. These points are clear enough. In May 1301 the White Guelphs of Pistoia, with the aid of their fellow Whites (then in control of Florence), were successful in expelling the Blacks, after which they destroyed the property and possessions of the exiles. But the Pistoian Blacks, having taken refuge in Florence, soon joined with the Blacks of that city. Later on All Saints’ Day, 1301, Pope Boniface’s ally CHARLES OF VALOIS entered the city of Florence, after vowing to remain neutral in the internecine struggle and to keep the peace in the city. Once in charge, however, Charles reneged on his promises and actively promoted the Black cause. In the unrest that followed, the exiled Black leader CORSO DONATI returned to Florence, where he helped the prisoners escape from jail. They joined him and his Black faction in rioting and pillaging White Guelph neighborhoods for some five days, while Charles did nothing to stop the violence. Over the next several months the Whites (including Dante) were banished from Florence. The rest of Fucci’s prophecy (ll. 145–150) is much murkier. Mars will send a bolt of lightning from Valdimagra that will battle with thick, obscuring clouds, creating a violent storm over the fields of Piceno. Most commentators believe that the bolt of lightning refers to the Black Guelph captain MOROELLO MALASPINA, who was from the region

Inferno of Valdimagra. In 1302 Malaspina led a force of Blacks against Pistoia. The clouds that envelop him presumably refer to a Pistoian army of Whites that surrounded Malaspina and his forces at Serravalle, near Piceno. In the ensuing battle Malaspina was able to overcome the Whites and rout them in a bitter and decisive defeat from which, as Fucci says, no White was to escape unscathed. As a White Guelph himself the pilgrim Dante cannot hear this news without feeling the grief that Fucci intends. The gesture with which Vanni Fucci opens Canto 25 is not unknown even today in Italy: The thumb is thrust through the first and second fingers of a closed fist in a coarse approximation of sexual penetration, the implied meaning being a fairly obvious “fuck you!” To brandish a pair of these “figs” in the face of God is a shockingly blasphemous gesture, but it graphically illustrates one of the points that Dante makes continuously in his portraits of the damned: As Capaneus had said in Canto 14, what these shades were in life, they are still in death. Hell is populated with unrepentant sinners, whose perpetual actions in each round reiterate their sins in life. Fucci’s actions put into sharp relief Dante’s occasional sympathy for the damned souls. The damned in Hell deserve no pity—if they did, God would have pitied them. To grieve over their punishments now would be to question God’s wisdom and justice. Their damnation is self-willed. The obscene gesture also introduces the motif of sexual imagery that will pervade this canto. It foreshadows the reptilian attacks on the bodies of the thieves around which the action of the canto revolves: In the first attack, on Agnello by the sixfooted serpent, the viper clings to Agnello, biting him on both cheeks and spreading his thighs with its hind feet, thrusting its tail between Agnello’s legs. The two then literally become one. The imagery is that of rape, of sexual violation; the mood that of psychological nightmare. In part this contributes to the horror of the scene. In his edition of the poem Robert Pinsky has noted that the romantic creation of the horror genre (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example) involves physical transformation of the body with erotic and moral overtones—as in the intimate bite of the vampire.

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Dante creates that kind of mood in this canto and so anticipates the genre. But more than that the sexual imagery here underscores the nature of the sin and the contrapasso in its punishment. Certainly the divine retribution in this scene is clear: The sin of the thieves was in taking what belonged to others, in a refusal to recognize the rights of others to retain what belonged to them. In Hell the thieves can call nothing at all their own, even their own bodies. They are constantly in danger of having their human form stolen from them and must perpetually repeat their sins by stealing back a body that is no longer theirs. But more than this Dante presents theft itself as a kind of violation. A human being’s right to privacy includes all that is private and intimate to that person. The presentation of theft as sexual abuse aptly portrays the violated feeling of the thief’s victim. The canto’s “five noble Florentine sinners,” as they are sometimes called (noble in the sense of aristocratic), have been identified with some consensus: Two of the sinners who first greet the poets are the former Ghibellines Puccio Sciancato (“the lame”) and Agnello Brunelleschi; the third, Buoso, may be either Buoso degli Abati or more probably Buoso Donati (infamous for his dishonesty in public office). The six-footed serpent who attacks Agnello is Cianfa de’ Donati, like Buoso a member of the Donati family that was to dominate the Florentine Black Guelph party. The fifth thief, the small serpent that bites Buoso, is Francesco dei Cavalcanti, a kinsman of Dante’s friend Guido and an associate of Buoso Donati. All five were older contemporaries of Dante, active (and notorious) in the late 13th century. Before Dante describes these bizarre metamorphoses, the pilgrim makes a gesture of his own, putting his finger to his lips (ll. 44–45) to prevent Virgil from speaking while the two of them observe the bestial attacks that fill the remainder of the canto. Dante’s gesture has attracted far less attention than Fucci’s, but it can be no coincidence that such a sign occurs here, soon after Fucci’s more memorable one. It would seem that the poet wants to associate his pilgrim persona with the vile thief. But why?

80 Inferno In addition to the vivid, surreal descriptions themselves much of the rest of the Canto consists of Dante’s boasts that he is outdoing his predecessors in the genre of narrative poetry. Let Ovid and Lucan be silent, Dante says (ll. 93, 97), for their accounts of the transformations of Cadmus and Arethusa (in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 4.576, 5.572), of Nasidius and Sabellus (in Lucan’s Pharsalia 9.763, 790) must pale in comparison to Dante’s own narration in this canto. Since he has already silenced Virgil with his earlier gesture, Dante is metaphorically silencing all the great narrative poets who preceded him to claim his own ascendancy in the genre. In fact the poet Dante knows that he could not here present this imaginative account of these metamorphoses without the prior examples of Virgil, Lucan, and particularly Ovid. In a sense he has stolen their technique, as in some ways all poets are thieves, building on the examples of the previous poets that inspire them. Further in seeking to displace those poets by outdoing them at their own game, Dante the narrator is performing another kind of theft—a theft of their reputations. Thus the character of Dante does, in fact, reflect the thief Vanni Fucci. As in other circles of Hell Dante once again participates in the sin of those he observes. Many readers have taken Dante’s boasting in this canto at face value (as they do Dante’s placing himself among the great classical poets in Limbo in Canto 4). Certainly Dante has never been accused of modesty. However, the pilgrim is still deep in Hell at this point, and the ultimate purpose of this leg of his journey is the recognition of sin—allegorically the sin within himself. The context of his remarks here includes Virgil’s assertion to him when the poets first entered this bolgia at the beginning of Canto 24: that fame is the means by which human beings achieve immortal status. Here Dante claims that pagan immortality that Virgil held out to him as an ideal. But that fame, Dante implies, is at least in part the product of the sin of theft. And he is, after all—with Ovid and Lucan and Virgil himself—still in Hell. Dante’s diatribe against his native city at the beginning of Canto 26 is apparently motivated by the five noble thieves of Florence who populate

the bolgia of thieves in Canto 25; however, it may be inspired as well by the evil counselors who inhabit the eighth bolgia, which he is now entering, for, Dante would certainly have argued, it was purely by the evil counsel of those who conspired against him that he was unjustly banished from Florence. The reference in this invective to “Prato” has been the object of some critical debate, with some scholars suggesting that it refers to the small town of Prato near Florence. In 1309 the town took part in a rebellion against the Florentine Black Guelphs, a possible reason for them to wish for Florence’s downfall, as Dante suggests in lines 7–9. But Dante is much more probably referring to Cardinal Niccolò da Prato. In 1304 Cardinal Prato was sent as papal legate to Florence by Benedict XI, successor of Dante’s great enemy Boniface VIII. The cardinal’s assignment was to seek reconciliation between the Whites and Blacks, but when he could make no progress with either side, the frustrated Prato placed the city under interdict (that is, he forbade priests to perform any sacraments in the city). Shortly after the pronouncement of this ecclesiastical curse, a bridge collapsed in Florence, and this was soon followed by a great fire in the city. Both disasters claimed many lives, and some citizens were quick to attribute the catastrophes to the cardinal’s curse. The sinners of Canto 26 are generally designated “evil counselors”—their sins are related to the misuse of their intellectual gifts for purposes of deceit, trickery, and the attainment of questionable goals. Thus Ulysses is here chiefly for the stratagem of the wooden horse that brought about the destruction of Troy—the city that Dante would have seen as the cradle of Roman, and hence Italian, civilization. Because the devices of the evil counselors were hatched under the cover of secrecy, their souls are hidden in flames. And because their sins involved their smooth, persuasive speech, the flames that engulf them wave like so many glib tongues. One of the curious details of this canto is Virgil’s proposal that he, rather than Dante, be the one to approach the Greek warriors Diomedes and Ulysses. Clearly Dante spoke no Greek, and it is probably true that the two classical heroes would

Inferno have thought Dante’s Tuscan dialect a barbarous tongue. Virgil himself, as did most educated Romans of his day, almost certainly spoke Greek, but there is nothing in the text that suggests Virgil speaks to the two heroes in Greek, and the poet clearly understands Ulysses’ response to Virgil’s question, so it must be spoken in a language Dante recognizes. As he has in prior encounters with classical heroes, like that with Jason in the first bolgia (Canto 18), Virgil approaches Diomedes and Ulysses with great respect, speaking to them as an epic poet who helped spread their renown in his verse. The most attractive explanation for Virgil’s position in this situation is that he performs here the same function his poetry served in life: Since Dante, and medieval Christians in general, were unfamiliar with Greek, it was through the classical Roman writers that Dante and his contemporaries were able to hear of the classical heroes. Thus Virgil, figuratively and literally, serves as intermediary between Dante and Homer. Ulysses’ speech, one of the best known of the entire Comedy, is also one of the most misunderstood. From our modern point of view Ulysses’ voyage seems heroic, his individualism admirable, and his desire to gain all virtue and knowledge in life evidence that he anticipates the Renaissance man, who takes all knowledge as his province. This is the Ulysses of Tennyson’s great poem. Modern readers will tend to see a prescient Dante as creating a hero who is a century ahead of his time: He may be in Hell for his evil counsel, but this story has nothing to do with that sin. But once again Dante leads the reader into being charmed by the sinner without recognizing the sin. Like Virgil, we are drawn to admire heroic action for its own sake, and we forget to apply the Christian ethic that is the backbone of the Comedy. It is Ulysses’ tongue that has counseled evil before, and it is his tongue that wins over the crew in his story—and his readers ever since—but it wins them to what even Ulysses himself calls “madness.” Ulysses persuades his men to sail to their deaths by transcending the bounds set for human beings by the gods—an act that even in Ulysses’ own day would be considered hubris, the kind of overweening pride by which one puts oneself above the gods.

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Thus his speech itself is an example of his evil counsel. Consider, too, that Ulysses’ speech in this canto is modeled directly on Aeneas’s speech to his troops in Virgil’s poem (which, ironically, is modeled on Ulysses’ exhortation to his own men in the Odyssey). Unlike Virgil’s pious Aeneas, who follows the will of the gods at all times, sublimating his own desires to the divine will, Ulysses follows only his own reckless schemes. And where Ulysses says that neither the desire to be with his wife, Penelope; nor his son, Telemachus; nor his aged father, Laertes, was enough to dissuade him from acting on his desire to know all the world, Aeneas’s concern is always for his father, Anchises; his son, Ascanius; and his wife, Creusa. Despite his admiration for Ulysses in Dante’s text, the real Virgil had quite a different view of heroism than that of Dante’s Ulysses. Ulysses’ intellectual pride should remind the reader of something else, though: Dante’s own boasting in the previous canto. We have not yet finished with the implications of Virgil’s lecture on immortality through fame with which he opened Canto 25. Ulysses is the most famous character who speaks in the Inferno. He is the classical hero whose fame has lasted for thousands of years. Known for his own silver-tongued rhetoric, he has survived through the words of poets like Virgil and Dante. Yet he is in Hell, damned for eternity. Fame for its own sake, unconnected to a higher cause, is ultimately valueless. Here is the clearest of all answers to Dante’s desire to surpass Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus), and Virgil—to his own hubris. That road, like Ulysses’ voyage, is merely another route to Hell. If there are any lingering doubts about the nature of Ulysses’ fame and heroic stature, the immediate introduction of Guido da Montefeltro as his fellow sinner in bolgia eight should be enough to erase them. There is a dramatic shift from highflown epic rhetoric to Italian vernacular as Guido seeks information about his own Romagna from one whose Lombard accent he recognizes. Virgil is dismissive, even rude to Guido (in contrast to his almost obsequious approach to Ulysses), and tells Dante to speak with him, since Guido is Italian.

82 Inferno But the juxtaposition of Guido and Ulysses undercuts the pretensions of the Greek hero and shows Virgil’s admiration of him to be misplaced. For Guido is by no stretch of the imagination a heroic figure. Like many of the Italians in Hell, Guido is still passionately patriotic. But far from seeing this attitude as a virtue, Dante presents it as misguided: They are in death what they were in life, and their values are still misplaced. Ironically Guido claims in his confession to the pilgrim that he withdrew from his active political life, repenting of his past sins, to devote himself to God through the life of a Franciscan. Yet his very first words to the poets display his unabated interest in the politics of Romagna. Clearly his retreat from the world was nothing more than a pose. The fact that Boniface was apparently able to persuade Guido to forget his vows and take up his old ways as well implies that Guido’s repentance was equally insincere. For Guido, as for Ulysses, the power to deceive through cunning words is irresistible, and the fact that Guido says that his plan (of adopting the friar’s robe) would have worked (line 69) if Boniface had not interfered suggests that his retirement from military life was, for Guido, not true repentance but simply a strategy to deceive God into saving him despite his former sins. It is even possible, Mark Musa has suggested in his edition of the poem (369), that Guido may be lying about the entire encounter with the pope. It is unclear where Dante found the story—there is an independent Ferrarese chronicle written before 1313 that records the pope’s encounter with Guido, but it is possible that that account was based on Dante’s story. Although Guido tells Dante that he will only answer him because he knows no one can return to the earth from this pit of Hell, and so he believes his reputation is safe, he may suspect that Dante is telling the truth when he says he can spread Guido’s fame in the world. Guido’s main concern in his story is to excuse himself and to throw the blame on someone else—Boniface VIII—for his own damnation. There is, of course, no way for Dante or any of his readers to know what really happened between Guido and Boniface, and therefore Guido could easily be slanting the story to make himself appear innocent.

The story of Saint Francis and the black cherub is, of course, also a Dantean invention. According to this account Guido’s damnation is established through logic: Under normal circumstances Boniface’s absolution should have been enough to save Guido. The appropriate rites were followed. Even if, as Dante contended, Boniface was a sinful priest, the sacrament itself was nevertheless salvific. But the cherub—a fallen member of the second order of angels, who, according to medieval supposition, were the most learned—applies the Aristotelian logic of contradictions to the situation: One cannot repent of a sin at the same time one’s will is determined to commit it; therefore, Boniface’s prior absolution is invalid. Divine justice, Dante implies, must conform to rational precepts. It should be noted that this particular anecdote anticipates a similar incident in Canto 5 of the Purgatorio, involving Guido’s own son, BUONCONTE DA MONTEFELTRO. There is a similar contest over the soul of the late-repentant Buonconte, but this one is ultimately resolved in favor of salvation. The parallel incidents vividly illustrate the difference between true and false repentance. One final aspect of this canto that has excited some critical commentary is the striking resemblance of Guido’s political philosophy to that of the influential Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. Aside from a general similarity in their pragmatic attitudes, Guido’s metaphor of the politician as the lion or the fox anticipates Machiavelli’s use of the same terms in Book 18 of The Prince. The image ultimately is taken from MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO’s De officiis (1.13.41), where he says that one may do injury through force (like a lion) or through deceit (like a fox), but deceit is more contemptible. But whereas Cicero and Dante see these kinds of acts as despicable, Machiavelli asserts that they are indispensable for the successful prince. As in the case of Ulysses Dante’s judgment of this kind of behavior—and his consignment of it to Hell—is at odds with the prevailing attitudes that would emerge later, in the Renaissance. Canto 28 opens with Dante’s employing what is known in medieval literature as the “inexpressibility topos”—a conventionally humble expression of the writer’s inability to put into words what he is about

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The Schismatics and Sowers of Discord: Mohammed and Ali, from Canto 28 of the Inferno, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

to attempt to describe. Dante will use this device more and more in the Paradiso, where the impossibility of expressing the divine in human words becomes a progressively difficult problem. Here the poet faces the opposite difficulty: The horrors of this particular bolgia are beyond human expression. Dante begins in a high epic style, invoking the great battles of the Romans and Samnites, or of the Punic Wars, with which to compare the carnage that he sees here. He then lapses into a colloquial, even vulgar style to depict the wounds of Muhammad, slit from the chin to the “place where we fart” (28, l. 24), and dragging between his legs the sack in which our food turns “to shit” (28, ll. 26–27). Battle wounds are not glorious for Dante; nor, for that matter, are the consequences of sin, which these mutilations are.

This canto is unusual in its steady march of sinners on and off stage, with little commentary or reflection by Virgil or by Dante. Still the sinners do not appear randomly but seem to follow a certain order: religious schismatics (Muhammad and Ali), followed by political schismatics (Curio and Mosca de’ Lamberti), and finally one who sowed discord not only on a political level but within the family of King Henry II—Bertran de Born. The purpose of the canto seems chiefly to illustrate most vividly the Dantean concept of contrapasso, embodied so perfectly in Bertran, whose appearance is the culmination of the canto and who is the only person in the Inferno actually to use the term contrapasso. He uses it to describe his punishment—he severed son from father, and so for eternity his head is severed from his body in symbolic retribution. Readers ever

84 Inferno since have applied the term to all of the punishments throughout the Inferno. The word itself is derived from the medieval Latin translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where the philosopher uses the term contrapassum to indicate a kind of retributive justice. Thomas Aquinas commented on Aristotle’s term and applied it to a discussion of the Old Testament principle of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” (Exodus 21.24). Other Scholastic philosophers adopted the term, and so Dante saw it as appropriate for his own conception of infernal retributive justice. Like Bertran de Born, all of the sinners in Hell are punished in a way that suits their particular sin, either symbolically or literally, a way that may even take the form of a reenactment of the sin itself. There are implications beyond this, of course, as I have mentioned previously: The contrapasso is the sinners’ own self-willed punishment, and they reenact their sins because they are the same people in Hell as they were on earth. One puzzling aspect of this Canto is the way so many shades crowd toward Dante when they hear that he is alive. Nowhere else in the Inferno do so many sinners go forward, all eager to be remembered and to have Dante relay messages to people in the world. Nowhere else are the sinners so keen to claim some kind of existence or connection with people outside Hell. Such behavior is particularly curious this deep in Hell, since so many sinners lying above these schismatics were reluctant to have their names known. One is forced to conclude that there must be something about this particular sin that prompts such behavior. Perhaps their need to meddle in earthly affairs—a need that ultimately damned them as they instigated friction and dissension in those affairs—still burns in them now: Like the other sinners, they are the same now as they were on earth. The most ironic aspect of their interest, however, is that it can never be satisfied. In life the sinners separated what God intended should remain intact—the church, the state, the family. The final act of separation resulting from these sinners’ actions was their own damnation, which severs them from all normal human contact eternally. Thus the sowers of discord are responsible for the very schism they are trying to bridge by speaking with Dante.

It is curious that some commentators have explained or even justified Dante’s interest in his kinsman Geri del Bello in the opening of Canto 29 by remarking that vengeance for the death of a family member—the private vendetta—was traditional and even sanctioned by Florentine law in Dante’s time. Indeed it was even believed to be sanctioned in Scripture: Numbers 35.19 reads, “The avenger of blood is the one who shall put the murderer to death; when they meet, the avenger of blood shall execute the sentence” (NRSV). Should the pilgrim Dante not have learned something by now about vengeance, having just met the figure of Mosca de’ Lamberti, whose insistence on a blood vendetta tore apart his native city for generations? Certainly the poet Dante must intend readers to see the irony of his character’s feelings of guilt at this point and recognize that family honor may be just another excuse for sowing discord, as Dante’s kinsman is doing here, even from Hell. There is a natural transition from the mutilated bodies of the schismatics into the diseased forms of the falsifiers, suggesting the interrelatedness of the sins of fraud punished in Malebolge. In a scheme that will not become apparent until Dante completes his exploration of bolgia 10 in the next canto, the falsifiers are subdivided into four different groups of sinners, each of which is afflicted with its own particular disease. The alchemists, whom the poets meet in Canto 29, are covered with leprous scabs. At one point Virgil compares these scabs to rings of chain mail (l. 85), perhaps a fitting affliction for those who falsified metals. Alchemy itself (condemned in 1317 by a papal bull of POPE JOHN XXII) specifically attempts to transform base metals into replications or imitations of precious ones like silver and gold. Although some serious philosophers—Roger Bacon or ALBERTUS MAGNUS, for example—were deeply interested in the science of alchemy, there were also a number of charlatans (like the canon described in Chaucer’s “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale”) whose sole purpose was to deceive others for their own gain. Their inclusion in the Hell of the fraudulent and the falsifiers is therefore appropriate. The precise nature of the contrapasso in this bolgia is not immediately apparent. In one sense their

Inferno sickness suggests a kind of inner infection, a moral corruption from within that erupts into disgusting physical ailments. But the sin of the falsifiers has mainly to do with deception—they deceive the eyes, the ears, or the other senses of their victims, thereby creating a false impression. Thus in their bolgia all of their own senses are afflicted—the darkness distresses their sight, the painful cries their hearing, the stench their sense of smell. Most of all the diseases afflict their sense of touch, so that ultimately the only world they know is one that they cannot properly perceive because of the assault on their five senses. In his translation of the poem John Ciardi comments that the conditions in bolgia 10 reflect what society would become if all falsifiers were successful—a place where none of our senses could be trusted to give us truth or comfort (242). A remarkable detail of Canto 29 is the way in which Dante joins the sinners Griffolino da Arezzo and Capocchio in a series of comic insults directed at the citizens of Siena. As with Dante’s earlier interest in avenging Geri del Bello, commentators have generally accepted the pilgrim’s remarks at face value, explaining that Siena and Florence were rivals, and that their citizens would often poke fun at one another. But surely there is more to this canto than Dante’s engaging in a little lighthearted fun at the expense of the Sienese while exploring the depths of Hell. Mark Musa points out that Capocchio’s ironic comments—pretending to praise three of the most foolish of all the Sienese as a way of condemning them—do with language precisely what he has done with metals: falsify it by using language not for clear communication but only for the comic effects of satire (II, 392). Thus the pilgrim Dante, in joining in the derision, participates in the sin of falsification, just as earlier in the canto he had participated in the schismatic Geri’s sin. It is worth commenting on some of the physical details mentioned by Virgil in Canto 29. First he tells Dante that the ninth bolgia is 22 miles around (Canto 29, l. 9), and we learn in the next canto that the bolgia they are entering, bolgia 10, is half that distance (Canto 30, l. 86). This clarifies the shape of Hell as Dante conceives it: It is a giant

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cone that becomes progressively narrower as the pilgrims move toward the bottom, at the center of the earth. In addition Virgil—with the uncanny ability to read the stars from underground—mentions that there is not time for Dante to keep watching the sinners of bolgia nine because the moon is already directly under their feet. This suggests that the sun must be directly above their heads, and that it is now noon on Holy Saturday. Since their journey began at sundown on Good Friday, the poets have now been traveling some 18 hours. The falsifiers of Canto 30 represent a more significant threat to society than the alchemists of Canto 29, for these sinners have falsified identity, money, and words. Any society must agree on what these three things mean if it is to function at all. Each group of falsifiers is stricken with a different malady as punishment—a situation that implies a different specific contrapasso for each type of sinner. The falsifiers of identity run mad like animals, snatching and dragging away the forms of other sinners in the bolgia. In life these sinners disguised their own individuality, taking on the nature of another. So in death they have lost their minds— that faculty that gave them their sense of self—and reenact their sins by spending eternity stealing the shades of other personalities. Master Adam, the falsifier of currency, is bloated and deformed by dropsy. That deformity is a visual image of distortion that mirrors the counterfeiter’s sin: As Master Adam improperly mixed three ounces of alloy with the pure gold of the florin (l. 90), so (according to medieval science) his disease is caused by an improper mixture of bodily humors. As for the false witnesses the kind of burning fever they display would cause delirium in a living body, and hence false words, while their foul stench may symbolize the inner corruption caused by lies. The most striking incident in this canto is probably Virgil’s sharp reprimand of the pilgrim—his second in as many cantos—for taking excessive interest in the sinners of this bolgia. Why should Virgil be so angry, and why should Dante the pilgrim be so fascinated by the low-comic verbal wrangling of Sinon and Master Adam? Virgil has changed from the early cantos, where he used more gentle means to guide the pilgrim’s reactions,

86 Inferno even when they involved sympathy for the sinners. This deep in Hell, as the poets are about to enter the last circle, he expects more from Dante. By now the pilgrim should have learned that his purpose for the journey is not mere entertainment— Dante’s responses to the sinners he meets should include reasoned moral judgment in the recognition of the sin, not engagement with the sinners on their own level. But Dante’s interest in these sinners’ exchange may be more complex than Virgil implies. As scholars have pointed out, the insulting argument of Sinon and Master Adam bears a striking resemblance to the medieval lyric debate genre called the tenzone. In the tenzone two poets engaged in a debate, exchanging verses in which they often abused each other. Each poet would take a line or image from the other poet’s latest verse and use it to construct a new poem insulting the other poet. Dante himself had engaged in this sort of poetic contest early in his career with fellow poets like CECCO ANGIOLIERI and Forese Donati. In the tenzone between Sinon and Master Adam each speaker insults the other in a single tercet, and each poet picks out an image from the previous tercet to throw back at the other speaker. Thus when Adam strikes Sinon, he says that even though he cannot move, his arm is free to strike (ll. 106–108). Sinon answers that Adam’s arm was not so free when it was tied behind him at the stake when he was burned for his crimes (ll. 109–111). At that Adam says Sinon is speaking the truth but was not so truthful when he gave testimony at Troy (ll. 112–114). And so on. For Dante this passage is not merely the depiction of a pair of sinners arguing; it is the rejection of a form of poetry. Sinon and Master Adam are falsifiers of words—something that no poet should ever be. Yet here they engage in a poetic discussion that uses the form of poetry in a false way—merely to insult (and entertain), not to edify or enlighten. The young Dante, represented by the pilgrim, engaged in such trivialities. The mature Dante, the poet behind the Inferno, has a more vital purpose for his talent and expresses his disapproval through the mouth of Virgil. One final aspect of Canto 30 deals more closely with Dante’s language. For English students read-

ing the Comedy in translation, it is difficult to see beyond the power of Dante’s narrative to his skill as a poet. But that skill is apparent in this canto even in translation through his adept use of water imagery. As a number of commentators have pointed out, Master Adam’s great thirst, despite the superfluity of water he retains through his dropsy, causes him to imagine beautiful streams familiar to him from his youth—but this water cannot satisfy him. His hatred of the Guidi brothers is so intense, however, that he says he would trade Branda’s fountain (apparently a well-known fountain in Siena) for a sight of one of them suffering in Hell—a wish that likewise will never be satisfied. In his invective against Sinon Adam says that the liar’s fever would cause him to drink dry the mirror of Narcissus—a deep pond that reflected a false image that caused Narcissus to pine away with self-love. Adam’s references point to unsatisfying or frustrating experiences with water. But the canto ends with another water image: When Virgil sees Dante’s true repentance for his error, he tells him that his shame has washed away his guilt (l. 142). Perhaps there is an allusion to the beatitudes (Matthew 5.6), where those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are satisfied—Adam’s thirst has never been for righteousness, but the pilgrim’s true repentance is indeed a desire for that virtue. Perhaps, too, there is a suggestion of baptism: It is baptism that washes away sin, and contrition and absolution renew the effects of that cleansing baptism. Note, too, the allegory in the closing lines of this canto: Virgil tells Dante that whenever he feels the urge to take part in this kind of verbal abuse, he should remember that Virgil is always at his side. Since clearly Virgil will be at Dante’s side only through the next canticle of the Comedy, there must be something beyond the literal sense to these words. The implication seems to be that Virgil, as the symbol of human reason, is always with Dante, and that Dante should exercise his powers of reason before engaging in this sort of vulgar wrangling. Since at this point we are nearing the end of the Inferno, this may in fact be Dante’s farewell to the kinds of political attacks he has been making on his personal enemies, men like Boniface VIII. Dante seems here to free himself to transcend per-

Inferno    87 sonal and party interests as he prepares to enter the realms of the saved. Canto 31 is a transitional chapter, moving the poets from the wide circle of Malebolge into the ninth and last circle of Hell, Cocytus, where complex fraud is punished. The pit guarded by the giants is parallel to the great cliff and waterfall that separated the violent of circle seven from the fraudulent of circle eight. Similarly it parallels the walls of the city of Dis, which separated Lower Hell from the incontinent sinners of Upper Hell. Indeed Dante’s mistaking the looming giants for the towers of a city recalls the city of Dis and the fallen angels that man its walls in Canto 7. But the similarities do more than mark the transition in the plot. Both the fallen angels and the giants who guard the ninth circle were guilty of rebellion against their gods—the angels in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the giants in pagan classical myth. The pride and envy that lay behind both rebellions are in fact the chief motives behind all the sins punished in these lower circles. The worst sinners of all are those punished in the ninth circle. These are the shades of those whose fraudulent behavior was coupled with treachery against those to whom they had special ties—their families, their countries, their lords. Rebellion against God, the true and absolute lord, must be the worst of all these sins, and the poets will find the giant form of Lucifer himself, prefigured by these giants that guard this well, frozen in the ice in the center of Cocytus. The giants’ pride and envy, and their treacherous rebellion against their gods, make it fitting that they be assigned to this final pit. Dante even makes the comment, in lines 49–57, that nature did well to cease producing such giants. Whales and elephants are not so threatening, since they do not possess reason, but the coupling of intellect with brute force and evil will is a combination that is beyond human power to defeat. In his edition of the poem Mark Musa applies these three attributes to the sinners of Lower Hell: The sins of circles one through five are sins of weakness and appetite, whereas the sins of Lower Hell require an “evil will.” The violent commit sin through brute force joined with evil will, and the fraudulent of Male-

bolge sin through intellect combined with evil will. But the sinners of the ninth circle, like the giants who guard it, sin through evil will and brute force allied with intellect (2, 409). Thus the sinners in Cocytus are the worst of the sinners in Hell. It may not at first be clear why Nimrod is included among the giants here. Although medieval tradition made him a giant, he clearly did not take part in the rebellion of Titans against Jove. As the traditional builder of the Tower of Babel, however, Nimrod was guilty of pride and of rebellion against God. As for Antaeas, who took no part in the rebellion of his fellow Titans, he seems to have had the same prideful tendencies as his brother giants: He boasted, for example, that he could build a temple to his father, Neptune, out of the skulls of the enemies he had killed. It is through an appeal to his vanity—the promise that Dante can spread

Antaeus—Descent to the last Circle, from Canto 31 of the Inferno, by Gustave Doré. From Dante’s Inferno, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and Illustrated with the Designs of M. Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1885.

88    Inferno his fame on earth—that Virgil persuades him to help the poets. Still it seems clear that Antaeas is here not for any particular sin but as a guard with his fellow giants, whose nature—combining brute force with evil will and reason—symbolizes the sin of the final circle.

Compound Fraud (the Leopard) (Cantos 31–34) Synopsis As the pilgrims are about to enter the final circle of Hell, Dante the poet expresses doubts about his ability to find words harsh enough to express the true nature of that terrible pit, and he asks for help from the Muses to compose his verse. As Dante and Virgil are about to turn from the feet of the giant and enter the darkness, the poet hears a voice tell him to take care not to kick the heads below his feet. When Dante turns to look, he sees that the ninth circle, Cocytus, is a vast lake of solid ice, out of which protrude the heads of sinners whose faces, purple with the cold, are bent toward the ice in sorrow. These are the worst sinners in the universe—the treacherous ones, guilty of compound fraud with violence against others to whom they had special ties. In the first round, Caïna (named for Cain, the world’s first murderer of a kinsman), the poet’s attention is first drawn to a pair of sinners buried chest to chest in the ice, their tears running down and freezing between their faces, their heads butting together in fury. Another figure, his ears frozen off from the cold, calls out and identifies the pair for Dante: They are Napoleone and Alessandro, sons of Count Alberto of Mangona, who killed each other over their inheritance. The speaker points out other inhabitants of this round, including King Arthur’s treacherous son, Mordred; the Pistoian White Guelph Focaccia, who killed his Black Guelph cousin Detto de’ Cancellieri; and Sassol Mascheroni, a Florentine who killed his nephew over an inheritance. Finally the speaker identifies himself as Camicion de’ Pazzi, who murdered his relative Ubertino. The poets move on, farther toward the center of Cocytus and the bottom of Hell. Now they are in Antenora (named after Antenor, betrayer of his

native city of Troy), where the sinners are buried even deeper in the ice, so that they cannot move their heads at all and must stare perpetually down at the frozen lake. As the poets step through the heads, Dante’s foot kicks one, who cries out, asking whether Dante has come to take revenge on him for Montaperti (the great battle of 1260 in which the Florentine Guelphs were defeated by the Ghibellines). Dante asks Virgil to stop momentarily so that he can question this sinner. They halt, and Dante asks the sinner who he is. The shade responds by asking who Dante is, saying that he kicks as hard as a living man. To this Dante responds that he is in fact a living man, and he offers to make the shade’s name known to the world, if he desires fame. But that is the last thing this sinner wants, and he refuses to speak. Now the poet grabs the sinner by the back of the head and threatens to pull out all his hair if he does not reveal his identity. Still the shade refuses. One of the other sinners then asks why he is shouting so, identifying him by name: This is Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed the Guelphs at Montaperti by cutting off the hand of their standard bearer, leading to their confusion and defeat. Dante now expresses his disgust with Bocca, saying he will reveal everything to the world. Bocca tells the poet to leave and say whatever he wants, but in revenge reveals the name of the sinner who betrayed him: It is Buoso da Duera, who took a bribe to betray Manfred to Charles of Anjou. Farther ahead, Bocca continues, are the traitors Tesauro dei Beccheria, a Florentine abbot who sent covert messages to Ghibellines after their exile from the city; Gianni Soldanier, who deserted his own party to join the Florentine Guelphs; and Ganelon, the knight who betrayed Roland and Charlemagne’s rear guard to the Saracens. Farther on the pilgrims come across a more gruesome sight. Two heads are frozen in the same hole, and one of the heads is gnawing furiously on the other. The poet asks the angry shade for his story, vowing that if the shade’s vengeance is justified, he will tell his story to the living world. As Canto 33 opens, the sinner whom Dante addressed pauses in his grisly meal, wipes his lips on the hair of his victim, and responds to the

Inferno poet’s request: Telling his own story causes him great pain, he says, but if he can help to spread his victim’s infamy in the world, he is willing to relate the tale. He identifies himself as Count Ugolino and his victim as Archbishop RUGGIERI DEGLI UBALDINI DELLA PILA and goes on to tell what is perhaps the most famous story in the Inferno. Ruggieri had imprisoned Ugolino in a tower in Pisa, where the latter died. This is well known, Ugolino tells Dante, but the details of his death are not. Ugolino tells of a dream he had after several months in the tower, of a wolf and cubs torn to pieces in a hunt led by Ruggieri. Ugolino awoke from the dream to find his children, imprisoned there with him, asking for bread as he heard the sound of nails from below, sealing the tower door. Threatened with starvation, Ugolino chewed on his own hands in frustration and despair. But his children, thinking that he chewed his hands from hunger, offered him their own flesh to eat. Four days passed without food, before Ugolino’s son, Gaddo, died of starvation. After two more days all of his children had died, and Ugolino, blind from hunger, crawled over their bodies calling their names. He ends his story ambiguously, saying that “hunger proved more powerful than grief” (Canto 33, l. 75). Many have interpreted this to mean that Ugolino ate his own children’s flesh to prolong his life, though it may only mean that he finally succumbed to starvation. When he has finished his gruesome story, the shade returns with renewed vigor to his vicious devouring of Ruggieri’s skull. Dante takes this opportunity to address an apostrophe to the city of Pisa, chastising the citizens for allowing the innocent deaths of Ugolino’s four sons. Now the poets move to a new round, where the sinners are frozen with only half of their faces above the ice, pointing upward so that their tears freeze shut their eyes. This is Ptolomea (named for Ptolomaeus from the book of Maccabees, who killed his father-in-law at a banquet). Here are punished those who violently betrayed guests or hosts. As the poets walk against a bitterly cold wind, Dante asks Virgil where the wind blows from and is told only that he will see for himself soon enough. But hearing them, one of the sinners calls out and begs

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for one of the poets to break the ice from around the sinner’s eyes to enable his tears to flow, thereby allowing him a small release of anguish. The pilgrim promises to do so if the shade will reveal his name. Dante is surprised to find that this sinner is FRIAR (Fra) ALBERIGO, a Jovial Friar who murdered two of his kinsmen—Manfred and his son, Alberghetto—at a dinner to which he had invited them. This shocks Dante because Fra Alberigo was in fact still alive in the world at the time of the pilgrim’s journey. Alberigo reveals to Dante that souls guilty of this level of treachery will often fall directly into Ptolomea, their living bodies inhabited by demons in the physical world. Thus Alberigo identifies the sinner beside him as BRANCA D’ORIA of Genoa— murderer of his father-in-law, Michel Zanche, also at a banquet—even though Branca was not only still alive at the time of the Inferno’s compilation, but lived until 1325. Having told his story, Fra Alberigo asks Dante to fulfill his promise and free his frozen eyes, but the poet refuses, determining that cruelty to such a sinner was in fact virtue. Canto 33 ends with another apostrophe, this time to the city of Genoa, which produced sinners like Branca D’Oria. May their like be wiped from the earth, Dante urges. The final canto of the Inferno opens as Virgil quotes a Latin hymn, VEXILLA REGIS PRODEUNT (“Onward go the banners of the King”), but ironically adds the word Inferni (“of Hell”), for he and Dante are now approaching the “king” of Hell, Satan himself. Dante looks ahead to see what he believes at first to be a giant windmill, from which issues the cold wind that blows over the ice. They are passing now through the last round of circle nine, Judecca (named for JUDAS ISCARIOT), where lie those who betrayed their lords and benefactors. These sinners are completely submerged in the ice, and Dante sees them petrified in various positions in the frozen lake. Bereft of all warmth of love, these sinners have lost all human qualities and will exist eternally in this frozen state. Now Virgil stops Dante and tells him to look ahead. In this climactic moment of the Inferno the pilgrim sees that what he thought was a windmill is in fact the mammoth figure of Satan himself, frozen to his waist in the ice, making the wind with

90 Inferno the movement of his giant batlike wings. Looking on the hideous figure of pure evil, Dante notes that Satan has three faces, red, black, and yellow, and that tears mixed with blood run down each face. In each mouth Satan chews on a sinner: Judas, the betrayer of Christ, is stuffed headfirst into Satan’s central, red face. The black and yellow faces devour feet-first MARCUS JUNIUS BRUTUS and CASSIUS (GAIUS CASSIUS LONGINUS), the betrayers of Julius Caesar. Virgil now tells his ward that they have seen everything Hell has to offer, and it is time for them to leave, since night is beginning again in the world above. But their exit proves to be as strange as any vision the pilgrim has seen in Hell: With Dante clinging to his back, Virgil grabs onto the hairy side of Satan and begins to climb down his shaggy body through the ice. When they reach Satan’s thigh, they proceed to climb upward, and the confused Dante believes they are climbing back into Hell. But then Virgil shows him the devil’s two legs extending upward, and he explains that they have passed the center of gravity and are climbing out into the hemisphere opposite the one from which they entered Hell. Here, Virgil goes on, is the hemisphere of water, from which Mount Purgatory extends, on top of which is the earthly Paradise. Upon Satan’s fall from Heaven, which made the pit that was to become Hell, a great mass of land pushed up from the place where the fallen angel landed (in Dante’s geography, the spot precisely opposite Jerusalem on the other side of the globe), the earth itself pulling away to avoid the evil one, piling itself into a huge mountain. Thereby Satan’s fall created Mount Purgatory as well. The two poets climb upward through a cavern carved by a stream (probably the river Lethe) flowing from Purgatory into Hell and emerge at last through a small opening to see, for the first time since they entered the Inferno, the stars. They are at the foot of Mount Purgatory, and it is sunrise on Easter Sunday. Commentary Readers familiar chiefly with popular notions of Hell may be surprised at first to find that the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno is not a blazing fire but

rather a frozen lake of ice. But it is important to consider the allegorical significance in the contrapasso for this particular sin. Dante is dealing here with compound fraud: The sinners are those who by fraudulent means treacherously and violently betrayed those to whom they were bound by special ties—those for whom they should have felt a particular sort of binding love. For Dante God is love, and the love of God holds all the universe in ordered harmony; as Virgil will explain at some length in Canto 17 of the Purgatorio, all human actions are also motivated by love. The sinners in circle nine have perverted God’s gift of love, which gives to all things warmth and life. Thus they are eternally without warmth, in a frozen lake where there is no love and therefore no life. Three particular points in Canto 32 are worth noting: First the Canto opens with Dante employing a conventional “humility topos,” whereby he expresses his own inability appropriately to convey the harshness of this nadir of the universe. The poet invokes the Muses for the second time in the poem (he had first addressed them at the beginning of Canto 2, as he began his journey through Hell). The effect here is essentially to make a new beginning. Rhetorically the new invocation sets off the ninth circle as a separate place, underscoring the special nature of its inhabitants, whose sins have placed them beneath all the other sinners of the universe. It should be noted that Dante’s language here, in the original Italian, becomes as sharp and grating as he says he wants it to be—a development generally not observable in a translation. Second the passage in lines 19–21, where an unidentified voice warns Dante not to step on the heads of the frozen sinners, has been a site of some critical controversy. Some scholars claim that the voice is simply an unidentified sinner’s warning rising from the ice at Dante’s feet. Others have identified the voice as that of Virgil. Still others have suggested that the voice is that of one or both of the brothers whom Dante will see butting heads with one another in lines 40–42. The first of these suggestions seems the least satisfying, since it relates to nothing else in the poem. Mark Musa argues for Virgil as the speaker, pointing out that if the sinners’ heads are all looking downward in this

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Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, from Canto 32 of the Inferno, by Gustave Doré. From Dante’s Inferno, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and Illustrated with the Designs of M. Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1885.

round, they cannot have noticed the poets’ arrival (2.420). Singleton, however, thinks the speaker is probably one of the brothers, the earlier passage having created a suspense relieved by the pilgrim’s finally noticing the quarreling brothers 20 lines later (Inferno 2.584). This last argument seems more likely, since there seems to be no point in the narrator’s failure to identify Virgil as the speaker. Perhaps the most important aspect of Canto 32 concerns Dante’s altered relationship with the sinners he encounters. In the first place the pilgrim still seems to believe that the possibility of earthly fame may be an incentive for these sinners to reveal their stories to him. Thus he first approaches Bocca degli

Abati with the offer of immortalizing his name. The poet quickly finds that here the sinners seek only to avoid such immortality. As the cold represents their denial of life, so they also eschew the possibility of their names’ living after them. But after the pilgrim’s open sympathy for many of the sinners up to this point, readers may find his behavior toward Bocca somewhat disturbing: Though he had verbally abused Pope Nicholas in Canto 19, this is the first time Dante has actually contributed to the physical punishment of a sinner, and we may be taken aback by the vehemence of his cruelty as he yanks Bocca’s hair, threatening to pull it all out. Of course it may simply be that

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Dante is finally feeling the kind of righteous anger that Virgil has instructed him to feel throughout the poem. But that hardly explains the vicious cruelty of the attack. Possibly this is the Guelph Dante expressing his anger at the betrayal of his party and the loss of his city at Montaperti. But this kind of fanatical political squabbling is something Dante has been learning to leave behind throughout the Inferno—it would seem inappropriate for him to engage in it here. I would argue that the only satisfying explanation for Dante’s behavior here lies in the allegorical nature of these events. On the moral level Dante as Everyman must recognize the nature of sin and must recognize the sin within himself before he can begin the purgation of sin on the road to salvation. Thus the journey through Hell is the exploration of sin in his own psyche. The sinners of the ninth circle are those without human love; thus Dante’s treatment of them displays no human love. The pilgrim’s behavior enacts the sin, forcing his recognition of it in himself—perhaps particularly in relation to his political enemies. At the same time the sinners of this round are individuals on the literal level but allegorically represent the sins themselves. Thus Dante’s expression of hatred is not personal cruelty but is allegorically an expression of a sincere hatred of the sin of treachery. In this no doubt Dante expects his readers to concur. Ugolino’s pathetic tale of his imprisonment and death that forms the first half of Canto 33 is the longest single speech in the Inferno (72 lines). In many ways this moving and dramatic tale at the end of Dante’s journey through Hell parallels that of Francesca da Rimini in Canto 5, at the beginning of the pilgrim’s trek. In both cases Dante confronts a pair of sinners—Francesca with Paolo, Ugolino with Ruggieri—of whom only one speaks. In both cases the speaker weaves a compelling and emotional narrative, and both speakers are careful to gloss over their own culpability in the events related. Both speeches are carefully designed to affect the pilgrim emotionally: Francesca wants to win the pilgrim’s sympathy, while Ugolino wants to encourage Dante’s pity so that he will spread the story of Ruggieri’s guilt in the world.

But the pilgrim has seen much in the intervening cantos and is not so easily won over as he was when he met Francesca. Despite Ugolino’s somewhat accusatory aside to the pilgrim—“If you are not weeping now—do you ever weep?” (l. 42)—Dante shows no pity for the sinner. Instead he reacts in moral outrage, condemning Pisa in an apostrophe not for executing the traitor Ugolino but for including his innocent sons in the death sentence. The pilgrim has learned that scorn and righteous anger are the appropriate reactions to sin, rather than sentimental weakness toward the sinner. (It should probably be pointed out that, historically, Ugolino was imprisoned with two middle-aged sons and two grandsons, the younger of whom was 15. The “children” were not the young innocents Dante depicts, but for purposes of his own narrative, the poet Dante has altered some of the facts.) The question of whether Ugolino’s last line— “Then hunger proved more powerful than grief” (l. 75)—implies that he cannibalized the bodies of his dead sons is a point of critical contention. In his edition of the poem Charles Singleton pronounced that “such a view of the meaning here is hardly worth a serious rebuttal” (2.617). However more recent critics have indeed seriously considered the view and have pointed out the imagery of the passage and its thematic implications support the possibility that Dante intends the cannibalistic suggestion in this passage. First Ugolino’s entire tale is framed by his cannibalism of Ruggieri’s head. Of course this may only reflect the starved shade’s avenging himself with ironic justice on the shade of the one who starved him. But there are more important thematic allusions in the tale itself (see John Freccaro’s comments in Pinsky 352–353; see also Musa’s commentary 2.434). When Ugolino gnaws his hands in despair, his children believe that he does so out of hunger and offer themselves to him as food: “You were the one / who gave us this sad flesh; you take it from us!” (ll. 62–63). Scholars have pointed out how this offer echoes Christ’s eucharistic assertion in John 6.54: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day” (NRSV). Further the child Gaddo’s dying words in line 69—“Why don’t you help me?

Inferno Why, my father?”—seem to allude to Christ’s dying words from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27.46, NRSV). But Ugolino cannot see beyond the physical danger to the spiritual implications of these allusions. The children point the way to eternal life, but Ugolino is concerned only with his life on earth. His response to their concerns, even to their offered sacrifice, is to repress his grief, to make no response, to turn “to stone inside” (l. 49)—hardening his heart as Pharaoh did before God killed his firstborn. He refuses to weep—though he has accused Dante of cruelty for not weeping at the story—as he refuses to recognize the chance for salvation that his children naively show him. At the tale’s end Ugolino accepts the physical offer of the children’s flesh to extend his mortal life while missing the offer of Christ’s holy body as the key to eternal life. Ugolino’s cannibalism, thus, seems thematically motivated. The second half of Canto 33, dealing with Dante’s encounter with Friar Alberigo, raises questions even more significant for the Inferno as a whole. Of course here, too, the pilgrim displays the kind of objective intolerance for sin that has characterized his last two encounters. He also is depicted as taking part in the sin punished here in Ptolomea: here are the traitors to the laws of hospitality—those who make promises to protect and relieve others but treacherously betray them. In exchange for the friar’s story Dante promises to break the ice that covers Friar Alberigo’s eyes, vowing to go into Judecca, the lowest portion of Hell, if he lies. Of course since that is the pilgrim’s destination in any case—as a visitor rather than a tortured sinner—he is not technically lying. But he breaks his word, of course, with the comment that a traitor deserves to be betrayed. Most commentators believe that in this attitude the pilgrim approximates the views of Dante the poet. But I would suggest matters are more complex here: We have just witnessed the story of Ugolino’s betrayal by Ruggieri. No one would contend that it was a virtue for Ruggieri to have betrayed the traitor Ugolino. While the count may have received what he deserved, that fact does not make Ruggieri innocent. I think Dante’s actions here must be seen chiefly as his participation in the sin of this round. The pilgrim does show some

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spiritual progress, allowing himself no pity for the condemned sinners, but his spiritual growth is still incomplete at this point, and he has a good deal more to learn. His refraining from breaking the ice on Fra Alberigo’s eyes is certainly the right choice. The sinner’s frozen tears are a part of God’s punishment, and to free the friar’s eyes would be a presumptuous alteration of divine justice. To many readers, though, the most stunning aspect of Canto 33 is the fact that Dante has placed living sinners in Ptolomea. The kind of treachery punished here is so heinous that in some cases guilty souls leave their mortal bodies and fall directly to this place, leaving their earthly forms to be possessed by demons. Such an unorthodox doctrine is certain to give many readers pause. What about human free will? Can God justly damn a sinner before he has had the chance to repent? Cannot even the worst of sinners achieve salvation with a changed life or even through a deathbed repentance? Granted that God may punish some sinners with immediate retribution, Dante’s suggestion here still seems heretical if taken literally, although it has been suggested that his concept of demon possession is based on John 13.27, where at the Last Supper, Satan is said to enter into Judas. One allegorical interpretation that has been suggested is that a traitor like Friar Alberigo has so alienated himself from the rest of humanity by his crimes that his life is no longer human in any real sense; it is demonic. Considering the larger moral allegory of the entire poem, however, the doctrine expressed in Canto 33 makes perfect sense: As we have seen, the symbolic retribution or contrapasso exhibited in the previous circles of Hell all conflate the sin and its punishment: The sin itself is the punishment— on a moral level sin is Hell. Canto 33 illustrates that point more clearly than any previous cantos. The worse the sin, the greater the punishment; the greater the punishment, the deeper one is in Hell. If the sin is Hell itself, then the worst sins, like those of the round of Ptolomea, place the sinner more concretely and inescapably in a moral Hell. As they move into the final canto of the Inferno, many modern readers—their expectations distorted by contemporary mythologies—may be surprised to find Dante’s Satan a helpless sinner trapped at the

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bottom of Cocytus rather than actively reigning in Hell and spreading evil through the world. But for Dante the fallen angel is the principal sinner of the universe, and his punishment the same as that of the other sinners in Judecca: As they had, medieval Christians believed, Lucifer had treacherously and violently betrayed his natural lord and spiritual benefactor, God himself, by seeking to depose him through armed rebellion. For this he was cast from Heaven, his angelic beauty perverted to hideous grossness, and he is frozen now in the ice of Cocytus, forever separated from the warmth of divine love. Dante describes the fallen angel as a monster, giving him none of the grandeur of Milton’s Satan or the charm of Marlowe’s Mephistopheles. In the Inferno’s seventh and final address to the reader, Dante uses the conventional “inexpressibility topos,” claiming to find it impossible to do justice to the terrible vision of Satan, which left him stunned, neither dead nor alive. Yet he goes on to portray the monster in some detail. Dante’s Lucifer is a giant, far larger than Antaeus and his fellows in Canto 31. He is covered with shaggy hair and as a former seraph retains his six wings, although the wings are now like those of bats. Further Satan has three heads. Commentators have proposed a variety of interpretations for these heads: Some suggest they represent the three known continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia, or the three major political powers of Dante’s time (Rome, France, and Florence). Or the faces could represent the three categories of sin (incontinence, violence, and fraud) punished in the Inferno. Probably, however, Satan’s three faces are an infernal parody of the Trinity: As God exists in three persons, Satan—who tried to make himself a god— perverts that divine nature. Some believe that the three chief qualities associated with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are negatively reflected in the colors of Satan’s three faces: thus the yellow face denotes impotence, the opposite of power; the black face ignorance, the opposite of wisdom; and the red face hatred, the opposite of love. Dante’s choice of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius as the three chief sinners of history may also surprise modern readers somewhat. Judas Iscariot, of course,

is to be expected—as the betrayer of his spiritual master, the Son of God, Judas must belong in the same circle of Hell as his predecessor, Lucifer. But today we are not likely to think of Brutus and Cassius in the same category. For Dante, however, the Roman Empire was divinely ordained, destined to become the means for giving Christianity to the world. Thus on the secular level the two Romans’ betrayal of their benefactor Caesar, founder of the empire, was a sin of nearly the same severity as that of Judas. Through his depiction of the pilgrim’s confusion upon passing the center of gravity, Dante goes to great lengths to draw our attention to the precise physical position of Lucifer. He is frozen in the ice at the exact center of the Ptolemaic cosmos. In this system the nine moving spheres of Heaven circle the stationary Earth, so that the center of the Earth is the center of the universe, toward which, according to Aristotle, all objects of ponderous mass are drawn. In Dante’s symbolism weight signifies sin. Thus Satan, in the Earth’s physical center, is fixed at the point to which the weight of all the sin in the universe is naturally drawn. Dante is insightful enough regarding physical science to understand that passing through the center of gravity and emerging in the Southern Hemisphere has implications for the time frame of his narrative, and much of the last part of Canto 34 depends upon this time frame. In line 68 Virgil warns Dante that it will soon be night—that is, the evening of Holy Saturday is approaching. In Canto 1 Dante began his journey at sunset on Good Friday; therefore, it has taken the poets exactly 24 hours to move through Hell. Once the center of the Earth is passed, however, and the two begin their climb upward toward Purgatory on the other side of the Earth, Virgil tells the poet that the Sun has nearly reached “middle terce” (l. 96)—that is, about 7:30 A.M., between the canonical hours of prime (6:00) and terce (9:00). When it is night over Jerusalem (at the center of the hemisphere of land), it is morning over Mount Purgatory (at the center of the hemisphere of water, directly opposite Jerusalem). Scholars have had some difficulty explaining just how this 12-hour time difference affects the pilgrim. Some have suggested that time has moved forward

Purgatorio 12 hours; that would make it 7:30 on Easter morning when they begin their climb out of Hell. It seems more likely that the hemisphere of water is 12 hours behind Jerusalem, so that when Dante and Virgil begin their climb out, it is the morning of Holy Saturday. It is not clear how much time they take to clamber up from the pit. Since the poets took 24 hours to trek to the bottom of Hell, one might think it must take an equal amount of time to climb back out. If that were true, though, it would be daylight when they emerge in Purgatory—but it is clear that the stars are visible when they do. Dante merely says, in the last six lines of the Inferno (Canto 34, ll. 132–139), that they never rested but climbed out steadily. It would seem that their ascent is briefer than their descent, and this may suggest that Dante moves more easily as he leaves behind the weight of infernal sin, perhaps prefiguring the speed with which he will rise toward Heaven in the Paradiso. The most important symbolic point of these events, however, is that the poets must surface at the foot of Purgatory shortly before dawn on Easter morning, their emergence from Hell thereby paralleling Christ’s resurrection. Once they have set foot on Purgatory, they have left death and Hell behind and have entered the realm of salvation. This prevailing mood of optimism is reflected, too, in the Inferno’s final line: “We came out to see once more the stars” (34, l. 139). These points of heavenly light, invisible in the depths of Hell, stand as symbols of hope for the pilgrim, who from this moment will be ever moving upward, toward them. Each of the three main sections of the Commedia—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—ends with the same word: stelle or “stars.” The conclusions thus unite the parallel sections of the poem at the same time they underscore, by repetition, the direction that the pilgrim as Everyman, and the readers who identify with him, must travel in their journey toward God.

Purgatorio (1321) A reader who reads the Purgatorio with expectations from the Inferno may be inclined to see Dante’s

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second canticle as more of the same: sinners tormented with ingenious punishments appropriate to their individual misdeeds. But even the most casual reader immediately senses the vast difference in tone between the two texts. Here the bitterness, lamenting, and hopelessness of the eternally damned are replaced by a sense of joy and hope, for to land upon the shore of Purgatory is to enter the world of the saved. Thus the first rays of the Easter sunrise strike the pilgrim and Virgil as they emerge on this shore from Hell. The exact nature of these punishments and this hopefulness is clarified for the reader, and for the pilgrim Dante, in the central cantos of this canticle, in the comments of MARCO LOMBARDO (MARCO THE LOMBARD) on evil and free will and, particularly, in Virgil’s discourses on love, especially in Canto 17. Virgil notes that God implanted two kinds of love in the human soul. The first of these can never be wrong, since it is the instinctive desire of the soul to be reunited with God. The second kind of love does not err so long as it is in harmony with God’s will, but when it becomes perverted it always causes harm to others in sins of pride, envy, or wrath. When this love is insufficient, it causes sloth. When it is turned with excessive zeal toward worldly goods, it is the source of avarice, gluttony, and lust. The purpose of Purgatory—like the purpose of the sacrament of penance—is not retributive punishment for sin, but the corrective discipline of vice. In this Dante follows the Aristotelian notion of vice as a kind of flaw that results in a tendency to sin. Virtue, on the other hand, is a learned and reasoned tendency to act rightly, and it can be a habit formed by repetitive action. It is important to remember that entry into Purgatory is occasioned by the state of the soul at the moment of death. Since salvation could be brought about by a last-minute conversion (as in the case of MANFRED, whom Dante meets in Canto 3), many souls die without having formed a habit of virtue. Their goal in Purgatory is to eliminate their tendency toward vice and to reform their souls toward virtue, thus to refine those souls and ultimately enter God’s presence with their nature restored to the original sinless state of Adam before the Fall. Since this means redirecting their faulty love toward harmony

96 Purgatorio with the will of God, they are required to perfect their wills through this purgation. It is important to note that they do so not because of a sentence God has imposed upon them, but by their own free will, since their desire now is to achieve perfection. Thus the souls remain on each level of Purgatory until they themselves feel that they are ready to go on. When a soul like that of STATIUS in Canto 21 feels he has completed his corrective penance, he is free to move on toward heavenly bliss. Theologically these ideas about Purgatory were to a large extent Dante’s own interpretations. Indeed the Purgatorio is by far the most original of Dante’s imaginative otherworldly realms. Purgatory as a separate place in itself was, in the early 14th century, a rather new idea. Although the church had for centuries believed in the efficacy of prayers for the dead, invoking the authority of 2 Maccabees 12.40–46 (in which the Jews pray for God’s forgiveness of those killed in battle), and although early church fathers like SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO and Jerome had discussed the abstract idea of purgatorial punishments (based on passages like Christ’s admonition in Matthew 12.31–32 that sin against the Holy Spirit would not be forgiven in this age “or the age to come”), it was not until the use of the term purgatorium by Peter Comestor and Saint Bernard in about 1170–80 that the idea of Purgatory as a separate realm of the afterlife began to form. Pope Innocent III acknowledged the existence of Purgatory in 1210, and at the Council of Lyons in 1274 both Greek and Roman delegates agreed to accept the doctrine of Purgatory. It remained for Dante to give this concept a shape and a physical presence. He is completely original in placing Purgatory on an island in the Southern Hemisphere, directly opposite the city of Jerusalem, and in placing the Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden, on the peak of the mountain. Dante’s Purgatory has a three-part structure, with the lowest level, the Ante-Purgatory, peopled by souls that have not yet reached the stage at which they are ready to begin their self-willed purgation. These include the excommunicate, the indolent, and the late repentant, all of whom must wait before beginning their climb up the mountain. I should note here the importance of time in the

Purgatorio—of all the realms of the afterlife Purgatory is the only one in which time passes as it does among the living, since in fact Purgatory is a place on the earth itself. Thus Dante repeatedly draws the reader’s attention to what time it is in Jerusalem or the Ganges or the Pillars of Hercules when it is a specific time in Purgatory. Therefore the souls whom Dante meets are hyperaware of the passing of time and consistently implore Dante to ask their friends or relatives to pray for them, since that will lessen the time they must spend on the mountain. This Ante-Purgatory is Dante’s own invention, and he separates it from Purgatory proper by a steep cliff and by a door with two locks, guarded by an angel. This central section of Purgatory is composed of seven concentric terraces encircling the mountain, each of which is devoted to one of the seven deadly sins (or, more properly, vices): pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. Each soul must spend time on the terraces corresponding to the vices that still affect the soul’s will. Thus some souls may spend hundreds of years on one ledge, while others may need to do no penance there at all. All terraces are structured in roughly the same manner: Each circle begins with exempla of the virtue that directly opposes the particular vice purged on that level. The exempla always include an example from the life of the Virgin, plus one classical and one other biblical illustration. The penitents on each terrace all recite an appropriate prayer as they undergo an act of penance appropriate to their sin (the prideful, for example, walk with large stones on their backs that weigh them down with humility). Finally more exempla are shown, this time of the vice itself and the evil it causes. Clearly the penitents are urged to emulate the good examples and shun the evil ones. As Dante the pilgrim leaves each level, he hears an appropriate beatitude, and a guardian angel removes one of seven “p’s” (symbols of the seven vices) from his forehead in a final act of absolution. Indeed the entire action of each circle of Purgatory seems patterned after the sacrament of confession, with its penance and absolution. Another sharp division, this time a ring of fire, separates the Garden of Eden from Purgatory proper. Dante’s placement of the Earthly Paradise at the

Purgatorio peak of Mount Purgatory is certainly an unorthodox choice, but it makes sense for a number of reasons. It puts Eden directly opposite Jerusalem, so that the scene of humankind’s damnation is on the same axis as the place of our salvation. Christ’s redemptive act opened Purgatory to human souls, in Dante’s view, thus enabling them to climb toward God, resting at the mountain’s peak in Eden, to which they have returned in pure innocence, that human nature marred by Adam’s sin now fully restored to its pristine unfallen state. Thus all of salvation history is played out for the pilgrim Dante in a great heavenly pageant when he reaches the Earthly Paradise, glorifying the grand history of which his own salvation is a part. It is here, too (in Canto 30), that Beatrice finally makes her appearance, in a grand entrance that the reader has been anticipating since the first mention of her name in Canto 2 of the Inferno. Readers are often bewildered by her austere greeting of the pilgrim and her stern judgment of his sins. Allegorically however Beatrice here is a representation of Christ: She has been the force that awakened love in Dante, the one whose angelic qualities taught him to appreciate heavenly virtue, and the one whose death focused his thoughts on the afterlife. She appears here as she has always been to Dante—his own experience of Christ in his life. As an allegorized Christ she judges the pilgrim here as Christ will ultimately judge all humankind at the Last Judgment; thus the pilgrim’s ordeal is an allegory of that final judgment. For many readers the Purgatorio is Dante’s crowning achievement. It is certainly the most original of all Dante’s works and has much of the sensual imagery of the Inferno, but with a far more hopeful and inspiring tone.

ANTE-PURGATORY (CANTOS 1–9) Synopsis Having emerged from Hell at the foot of Mount Purgatory, Dante declares his intention to sing of the second realm of the afterlife, that in which the human soul is purged of sin and made ready to enter Paradise. As he had at the beginning of the Inferno proper the poet once more invokes the aid of the Muses, in particular Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.

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As the Inferno had ended with the statement that the poets had gone forth from Hell to see the stars once more, the pilgrim begins this second canticle by gazing at the heavens, admiring the light of Venus, the morning star, shining brightly just before dawn on Easter morning. He notes as well four other stars only visible here in the Southern Hemisphere—stars that no living human has seen since Adam left the Earthly Paradise. Dante is suddenly aware of an old, distinguished-looking man standing near him—one in whose face the light of the four stars shines brightly. Believing the poets to be sinners escaped from Hell, the old man accosts them, demanding to know how and why they had left the borders of the Inferno. Virgil, who recognizes this guardian of Purgatory’s shores as Cato the Younger (CATO OF UTICA), kneels in respect and motions for Dante to do the same. They are not infernal refugees, Virgil explains, but rather make this journey at the request of a heavenly lady for the sake of Dante’s salvation. Virgil tells Cato that Dante seeks freedom—presumably from sin. He goes on to identify himself as a soul from Limbo, where Cato’s wife, Marcia, longs for him. The old man answers that he is no longer moved by Marcia, since she is in Hell (from which Cato himself has somehow been rescued), and rejects Virgil’s apparent attempts at flattery. But for Beatrice’s sake he is glad to allow the poets to continue up the mountain. They must first, however, make their way back to the shore of the island, where Virgil is to wash Dante’s face and eyes of the stains of Hell and then is to tie a pliant reed from the shore around Dante’s waist. After giving these instructions, Cato disappears. The poets descend directly to the shore, where Virgil washes Dante’s face with the morning dew and then plucks one of the reeds from the shore. To Dante’s astonishment another reed springs up immediately to replace the one Virgil has broken. As Canto 2 opens, the sun begins to rise over Purgatory while Dante and Virgil stand on the shore, wondering where to begin their ascent of the mountain. Suddenly the pilgrim Dante notices a glowing red light moving toward them over the water at tremendous speed. As the light gets closer

98 Purgatorio and the two poets discern white wings within the glow, Virgil calls to Dante to fall to his knees, for it is an angel of the Lord. As the angel draws closer, Dante bows his head because of the intensity of the light, but he notes that the angel is piloting a miraculous ship over the waves, on which are more than 100 redeemed souls, singing the hymn In exitu Israel de Aegypto (“When Israel came out of Egypt”). The angel makes a sign of blessing over the souls as they disembark, then leaves as quickly as he had come. But the newcomers wander about, trying to familiarize themselves with the place. When they see the poets, they ask whether they know the road up the mountain, but Virgil answers that he and Dante are also newcomers to this place. The group of souls now notices that Dante is still breathing and gathers around him in amazement. Suddenly one of the throng rushes toward Dante, arms outstretched to hold him. Three times Dante tries to embrace the newcomer, but three times he fails—the apparently substantial bodies in Purgatory are merely shades of their earthly forms. Dante has recognized the newcomer’s voice as that of his friend the singer and musician CASELLA. Dante asks why Casella, who had died some months earlier, was only now arriving at the mountain, and Casella answers that the angelic boatman, who takes souls when he pleases, several times refused to allow him on his ship. Now, Casella says, the angel has returned to the mouth of the Tiber, where all redeemed souls gather. Dante now requests a song from Casella to refresh him from his arduous journey so far. Casella obliges by launching into a performance of Dante’s own CANZONE Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona (“Love that speaks to me in my mind”) from the third book of the CONVIVIO. Virgil and all the newly arrived souls are captivated by the music when suddenly Cato of Utica reappears, chastising the souls for their sloth and enjoining them to run to the mountain to begin their climb. Their reverie broken, the shades all rush toward the mountain, and Dante and Virgil join them in their wild dash. As Canto 3 opens and the souls all begin to move toward the mountain, Dante shows concern for Virgil, who seems chagrined by Cato’s rebuke and his own failure to stop Dante from slipping

into triviality with Casella’s love song. But Virgil soon recovers and with the pilgrim begins to stride toward the mountain. As they walk with the sun behind them, Dante notices only his own shadow, and he momentarily panics, thinking Virgil has deserted him. Virgil calms Dante, telling him that the bodies of the dead shades are made of substances other than earthly elements—like the spheres of the heavens. Thus Dante could not embrace Casella in the previous canto. But, Virgil says, the bodies of shades can feel pain as well as heat and cold (otherwise the sufferings of the damned in the Inferno would be meaningless). If this is difficult to understand, Virgil goes on, that is because it is beyond the grasp of human reason. If the secrets of salvation were attainable by human reason alone, Virgil goes on to say, then there would have been no need for the Virgin Mary to have borne her son, and intellectual giants such as PLATO and ARISTOTLE would not be eternally confined to Limbo. By now the poets have reached the foot of the mountain that rises as a sheer cliff before them. As Virgil puzzles over how the pilgrims might make their way up the rock face, Dante looks up to the left and sees a large group of souls moving on a ledge along the cliff face toward them at an incredibly slow pace, so slowly that they barely seem to be moving. Virgil and Dante approach them, but the souls draw back from the poets until Virgil asks them where the mountain slopes enough to begin to climb. Then a few of the souls move forward, but when they see Dante’s shadow they draw back again. Virgil explains that Dante is alive and is there because God has willed it. Now satisfied, the crowd of souls motions for the poets to move ahead and lead the way. As Dante and Virgil walk ahead, one of the shades in the crowd asks Dante whether the poet recognizes him. When Dante says he does not, the soul identifies himself as EMPEROR FREDERICK II’s natural son Manfred, who was killed in battle with CHARLES OF ANJOU at Benevento in 1266. Manfred had been excommunicated twice and was buried in unhallowed ground after the battle. Manfred recalls how his body was disinterred by the archbishop of Cosenza on the orders of Pope Clement IV and

Purgatorio cast outside church territory to rot unburied on the banks of the Verde River. But because he turned to God as he lay dying, Manfred was saved despite his sins. Thus, Manfred asserts, the curse of the church is ineffectual if one truly repents and returns to God. Nothing can be done by pope or bishop to prevent the salvation of a repentant soul. Those who, as Manfred and the rest of this crowd did, died scorning the church are destined to wait on the shore of Purgatory for 30 times the length of their excommunication. This time can be shortened, however, by prayers of the faithful on earth—thus Manfred wants Dante to ask his virtuous daughter, Constance, to pray for him. So absorbed is he with listening to Manfred’s story, the pilgrim does not notice that more than three hours have passed. The entire group of contumacious souls then points out a small gap in the cliff face where the poets may begin their ascent. In Canto 4 Virgil and Dante begin to climb, using hands and feet to make their way up through the narrow pass. Dante is overcome with exertion and daunted by the height of the mountain he sees above him. He calls to Virgil to slow down, but Virgil encourages him to climb a little farther to a small ledge that circles the mountain just ahead. When they reach the ledge, the pilgrims sit and rest. They face the east, and Dante is surprised to find the Sun at his left, to the north. Virgil explains that this is an effect of their being in the Southern Hemisphere. Dante recognizes how this must be true but now asks Virgil about what is really troubling him: How much more must they climb?, the exhausted poet asks. Virgil responds that Purgatory has a unique quality: It is excruciatingly difficult to climb at the beginning but becomes progressively easier to ascend the higher one climbs. When the climbing becomes effortless, Virgil says, Dante will have reached the end of the path and can rest. At that point a sarcastic voice from behind a nearby boulder points out that Dante will probably feel like sitting down before he gets to that point. When the poets look behind the stone, they see a group of shades, all sprawled lazily, and one shade in particular—his head hanging down and his arms wrapped around his knees—whom

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Dante recognizes. This figure sarcastically asks Dante whether he has learned enough about why the sun is on the left, and Dante gives a half-smile, greeting his old friend BELACQUA, the laziest man in Florence. Dante exclaims that he is glad he need no longer worry about Belacqua’s fate but asks why he is lingering there. The lethargic Florentine responds that because through indolence he put off turning to God until the end of his life, he and the others on this ledge must wait in Ante-Purgatory for as long as he made God wait. But as Manfred had, he adds that his waiting time may be shortened by the intercessory prayers of the faithful on earth. At that point an impatient Virgil urges Dante to get up and move on—it is already noon, and the poets have been on the island for six hours already.

The ascent on the way to Purgatory, from Canto 4 of the Purgatory, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

100 Purgatorio As the poets begin their climb up from the ledge of the indolent at the beginning of Canto 5, one of the shades notices that Dante’s body is solid and lets no light pass through. As the pilgrim looks back, distracted by their interest, Virgil chides him for being so easily sidetracked from his chief goal. Dante blushes in embarrassment and moves ahead. As they climb the slope, the poets meet another group of shades crossing in front of them and chanting a Miserere (Psalm 50 [modern 51]) in alternating parts. They stop in wonder when they notice Dante’s solid body. Two of the group rush to the poets to inquire about Dante, and Virgil responds that he is indeed a living man. The two run back to their group—moving as quickly as a meteor through the sky, the poet says. At this news the entire group surges forward, and Dante, overwhelmed, asks Virgil to keep moving. The shades ask Dante whether he recognizes any of them, eager for him to carry news of them back to earth. They explain that they all were sinners who died violent deaths. They did, however, turn to God as they were dying, and he in turn had filled their hearts with a longing for him. Dante replies that he recognizes none of them, but that he will be glad to follow their wishes if they have a request of him. The pilgrim is now approached by three of these late-repentant souls. The first does not identify himself but is clearly JACOPO DEL CASSERO OF FANO, a podestà of Bologna murdered in the marshes near Oriaco in 1298. Jacopo begs Dante to ask the people of Fano, Jacopo’s hometown, to pray for his soul. The second shade is that of BUONCONTE DA MONTEFELTRO (son of Guido da Montefeltro from Canto 27 of the Inferno), a Ghibelline killed by the Florentine Guelphs at the BATTLE OF CAMPALDINO. Dante recognizes the name and wonders why Buonconte’s body was never found. Buonconte explains that he dragged himself, wounded, from the field and died near the banks of the Archiano River (a tributary of the ARNO) with the name of Jesus’ mother on his lips. When a devil arrived to take his soul, an angel of God prevented him because of that one prayer. But the devil caused Buonconte’s mortal remains to be washed away by the river and lost in the depths of the Arno. Buonconte laments

that no one, not even his widow, Giovanna, is praying for his soul. Finally the shade of a gentle and courteous woman steps forward. She identifies herself as La Pia (probably PIA DE TOLOMEI) and says she was born in Siena. In contrast to Buonconte’s full account she says only that her death was caused by one who had put his ring on her finger. No other details are given, but Pia very courteously asks that Dante remember her only after he has returned to the world and rested from his ordeal. Comparing his situation to that of a winner at a game of dice surrounded by hangers-on hoping to share in his winnings, Dante tries to leave behind the late-repentant, who still crowd around him hoping he can persuade their loved ones to pray for them. As Canto 6 opens, Dante recognizes several Italians who died violently among the faces pressing toward him (among them Benincasa da Laterina, Federigo Novello, and Count Orso of Mangona—son of NAPOLEONE DEGLI ALBERTI, the fratricide from Inferno 32). By promising to solicit prayers for them, Dante is able to extricate himself from the group. As he and Virgil move on, Dante asks the Latin poet about certain lines in his Aeneid in which Virgil denies the efficacy of prayer to alter the divine will (6.373–376). How can this be explained when so many of the souls in Purgatory beg for prayers from the faithful? Virgil responds that his words applied only to those who were separated from God. But if Dante wants a complete understanding of this point, he should wait until he meets Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise atop Mount Purgatory. At the mention of Beatrice’s name Dante is filled with new enthusiasm and is eager to climb on. Virgil cautions him, though, that they will only be able to travel during the daylight hours. The sun is now behind the mountain, and it is late afternoon on Easter Sunday. Now the poets catch sight of a solitary figure watching them from some way off. Virgil approaches him, confident that this soul will direct the poets to the best way up the mountain. The solitary shade is reluctant at first to address the pilgrims, but when he hears that Virgil is a native of Mantua, he rises and embraces his fellow townsman. This is the shade of the renowned troubadour poet SORDELLO.

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The Late Repenters, from Canto 5 of the Purgatorio, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

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When Dante sees the affection between these two Mantuans, he launches into a tirade against the Italy of his day that takes up the remainder of this canto. Beginning with an apostrophe to “slavish Italy” (l. 76), the poet laments the general lack of the kind of affection displayed here by the fellow countrymen from Mantua. The current political situation in Italy pits kinsman against kinsman. Church leaders are mismanaging the country, and the Hapsburg Emperor Albert stays in Germany and does nothing to create unity and peace in the region. All the towns of Italy are governed by tyrants, Dante claims. The poet ends with a sarcastic jibe at Florence as the model city for Italian politics: the epitome of the civil strife that characterizes the region. Canto 7 begins at the point of the action where Dante’s outburst had interrupted it. Sordello and Virgil embrace several times before Sordello finally asks Virgil’s identity. When the Latin poet reveals himself, Sordello bows his head and embraces Virgil with awe and reverence as the glory of the Latin tongue, and he wonders what grace or merit has allowed him the privilege of this sight. He asks Virgil whether he is indeed in Hell and where he dwells there. Virgil describes Limbo as a place of no torments but of hopelessness, describing the unbaptized infants and the virtuous pagans who reside there with him. He then asks Sordello to show them the fastest way to the entrance to Purgatory proper. Sordello offers to be their guide to that gate, but he warns that night is approaching, and no one can climb the mountain at night—although the souls are allowed to move down the mountain in the darkness. He proposes to take the poets to a place to rest for the night, among a group of souls they will be interested in meeting. They agree, and Sordello leads them to a beautiful valley filled with bright flowers and lovely fragrances. As the poets stand on the edge of the downward slope, Dante hears souls singing the compline hymn Salve Regina (“Hail, Queen”). From that vantage point, before the sun fails, Sordello points out to the poets eight figures among the crowd of negligent rulers who people the valley, listing many of their political failings at the

same time (the choice of eight figures is probably a reflection of Sordello’s famous poem on the death of his patron, Blacatz, in which he rebukes eight European princes for their political failings). He begins with RUDOLPH OF HAPSBURG, who neglected his duty toward Italy. He also points out Ottakar II, king of Bohemia, who warred against Rudolph; Philip III (the Bold), king of France and father of the king Sordello calls “the plague of France,” Philip IV; Henry “the Fat” of Navarre, who died of his own obesity; Pedro III of Aragon, who died without heirs; Charles of Anjou, who defeated Manfred and conquered the kingdom of Sicily at the pope’s behest; HENRY III of England, sitting by himself, who enjoyed a life of piety more than one of political action; and WILLIAM VII of Montferrat, who failed to put down a rebellion in the city of Alessandria. Light begins to fade at the beginning of Canto 8, as one of the souls in the valley stands up and, palms pressed together in prayer, begins to sing the compline hymn Te lucis ante (“Before [the ending of] the day”) so beautifully that Dante is lost in the music. The other negligent princes soon join in as they watch the heavens. Abruptly the poet breaks off and addresses the reader directly, drawing attention to the scene that is about to follow. In words that recall his similar caution to the reader about the difficult allegory in Canto 9 of the Inferno, Dante tells the reader to focus on this scene, for the truth is covered in a thinner veil here. Returning to the narrative, Dante describes the souls of the valley all gazing expectantly at the sky, when he suddenly becomes aware of a pair of angels descending from Heaven. The angels carry blunted swords broken off at the ends, and they are clothed in green, the color of their wings. The angels alight, one to the pilgrim’s right and one to the left on opposite sides of the valley. Dante can see their golden hair but cannot bear the brightness of their faces. Sordello reveals that the angels have arrived from the Virgin Mary to guard the valley against the invasion of the serpent. As Dante gazes about in fear, wondering where the serpent will emerge, Sordello tells the poets it is time to descend into the

Purgatorio    103 valley. But after only a few steps into the valley, one shade stops Dante and peers intently into his face, drawing close to see him in the deepening darkness. At once Dante recognizes Nino (Ugolino) Visconti, his old friend from Pisa, and rejoices to find him in Purgatory. Nino asks when it was that Dante died, but Dante replies that he is still in his first life. Both Nino and Sordello back away from him, astounded, and Nino calls to another shade to witness the marvel. But Nino takes the opportunity to ask Dante to contact his daughter, Giovanna, and ask her to pray for him, emphasizing the power of innocent prayer. For his widow, Beatrice, Nino has only rebuke. She has, he says, put off her white mourning garments and is about to be remarried. His face burning with righteous zeal, Nino predicts the disaster that will befall her new husband (Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, whose coat of arms is a serpent), who will be exiled from Milan very soon (in fact in 1302). Now the pilgrim’s attention is drawn once again to the heavens, where he sees that the four bright stars visible in the morning have disappeared and have been replaced by three more brilliant stars in the direction of the South Pole. Sordello interrupts Dante’s stargazing to point toward the serpent, slithering through the grass and flowers into the valley. Sordello calls it “our adversary” (l. 95), and Dante suggests that it may be the same snake that tempted Eve. The two angels now fly down from the valley’s rim, descending toward the serpent, who takes flight at their approach. The shade invited earlier by Nino now addresses Dante. It is Corrado (Conrad) II Malaspina, who asks whether the pilgrim has any news of Val di Magra, where he used to rule. Dante replies that he has never visited that land, but that all of Europe has heard of it and of the glorious Malaspina family. Although the world is perverted by what the pilgrim calls “Wicked Head” (possibly referring to the pope), the Malaspina family, Dante assures Corrado, remains virtuous. In response Corrado delivers another prophecy regarding Dante’s future: Before seven more years have passed, Dante himself will know firsthand the virtue of the Malaspina family (alluding to the assistance the family would give Dante during his exile).

The Eagle, from Canto 9 of the Purgatorio, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

It is near dawn when the pilgrim, still in his mortal body (weighed down by the flesh inherited from Adam), is overcome by weariness and lies down in the grass of the valley to sleep. He dreams of a great golden eagle that swoops down and snatches him up, as Jove once seized Ganymede, and carries him skyward into the sphere of fire (in medieval cosmography, just below the sphere of the Moon) where he and the eagle both burn. He awakens from the heat of the fire dazed and afraid. He is relieved to find Virgil beside him but surprised that it is daylight and that he is looking out over the sea. Virgil tells Dante not to be afraid, explaining that they have now arrived at the gate that leads into Purgatory proper. While the pilgrim slept, Virgil tells him, a lady named Lucy arrived, took his sleeping body in her arms, and carried him to this spot. Virgil followed her, leaving Sordello and the

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others behind in the valley. When the lady set Dante down, she showed Virgil the gate and then awakened the sleeping pilgrim as she left. Reassured, the pilgrim begins to climb toward the gate. In another address to the reader the poet warns that his verse is about to become more artful. As they approach the gate, Dante sees that there are three steps leading to what at first appears to be merely a gap in the cliff wall. On the top step is an angel whose face is too bright for the pilgrim to look upon, and the angel holds a naked sword. The guardian asks who the travelers are and why they have come, and Virgil responds that a lady of Heaven has directed them to this gate. The angel welcomes them and tells them to go forward. Virgil assists Dante up the steps: The first is shining white marble, the second dark purple and crumbling, the third as red as blood. On this third step the feet of the angel rest as he sits on the threshold of the gate, and Virgil urges Dante to ask the guardian to unlock the portal. The pilgrim falls on his knees, beating his breast three times, and begs the angel to turn the lock. With the point of his sword the angel cuts seven p’s into Dante’s forehead, instructing him to wash these wounds after he enters the gate. Then from his ash-colored robes the guardian draws out two keys, one silver and the other gold, and uses them to unlock the gate. One, he tells Dante, is more precious, but the other needs more wisdom to use, and it is the second key that finally turns the lock. Saint Peter entrusted these keys to him, the angel says, with the instruction to admit too many rather than too few. Now the angel pushes open the door, inviting Dante to enter but warning him not to look back or he will be forced to leave. As the gate opens, the hinges make a grating sound like thunder. But the noise sounds sweet to the pilgrim, and as he passes in he seems to hear the sound of voices chanting the hymn Te Deum laudamus (“We praise you, O God”). As Canto 9 closes, the poets have entered Purgatory. Commentary In the first canto of the Purgatorio we are clearly in another world. The joy and anticipation Dante feels as the second canticle begins is in sharp contrast to

the despair and dread that filled him through most of the Inferno. The difference, of course, is that in setting foot on the slopes of Purgatory, he has entered the realm of the saved. The recognition of sin is complete; now begins its purgation. But the difference between the souls of Purgatory and the shades in Hell is that here the souls know that they are saved and on their way to Paradise. The poet’s invocation to the Muses (ll. 8–12) links the beginning of this poem to the beginnings of the INFERNO (Canto 2, l. 7) and of the PARADISO (Canto 1, ll. 13–27), at the same time signaling a new beginning. Specifically Dante invokes Calliope, chief of the nine Muses and so the muse of epic poetry. Certainly Dante’s poem is epic in scope, but it does not celebrate the heroic action typical of epics. Thus Dante singles out Calliope not because of her association with the epic but because of her defeat of the daughters of Pierus. In Metamorphoses 5.294–678 OVID tells the story of the nine presumptuous daughters of the Macedonian king Pierus, who challenged the Muses to a singing contest. Pierus’s daughters sang a song of hubris, glorifying the giants who rebelled against the gods. Chosen to sing for the Muses, Calliope puts the Pierides to shame, and the defeated daughters are turned to magpies (as Dante mentions in lines 1–12). The story is a lesson in humility, and therefore Calliope is the appropriate Muse for this second canticle, whose chief theme is humility. That theme, in fact, underlies the incident of the reed at the end of Canto 1. All scholars concur that the reed symbolizes humility: The poets must descend to the shore—humble themselves—in order to pluck the reed. It is pliable and bends to gird Dante’s waist; Dante actually calls the plant itself “humble” in line 135. The reed thus replaces the cord that Dante tossed into the abyss to summon Geryon in Canto 16 of the Inferno, which, according to one interpretation, suggested his naïve self-confidence or pride. According to Cato Dante must wear the reed in order to pass through Purgatory—suggesting that one must be humble to perform the acts of contrition necessary to purge sin. But the reed also becomes a sort of talisman, recalling the golden bough that Aeneas was required to carry before

Purgatorio him through Hades in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. When another reed springs up immediately to take the place of the one Virgil plucks, it is a direct allusion to the Aeneid (6.136–144), where the golden bough is replaced as soon as it is removed. In Purgatory humility is the golden bough, the talisman that gives one safe passage. Readers may be unsure as to the significance of the four stars Dante sees in the heavens at the beginning of this canto. In Dante’s geography Purgatory stands directly opposite Jerusalem amid a hemisphere of water. Atop Purgatory, as we shall see, is the Earthly Paradise. After the Fall Adam and Eve were exiled from Paradise and forced to live in the hemisphere of land, the Northern Hemisphere, opposite Paradise. On the literal level Dante realizes that there are stars in the Southern Hemisphere that could not be visible in the north and thus asserts he is the first living man since Adam to have seen these stars. Allegorically these stars probably represent the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance). In Canto 8 Dante will see three more stars (the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity) that rise in the evening to replace these four. According to medieval theology the four cardinal virtues were infused into Adam and Eve, but since the fall, human nature has been so marred that the virtues must now be acquired. These four in particular are available to pagans as well as Christians—it was, after all, the pagan philosophers Plato and Aristotle who first identified them, and Dante remarks on how brightly these stars shine on the face of the pagan Cato. The role of Cato is another difficulty of this canto. As a pagan of the Stoic school Cato should be consigned, with Virgil, to Limbo. Because of his suicide, we may even expect to find him deeper in Hell, with PIER DELLE VIGNE in circle seven of the Inferno. As a rebel against Caesar he might even belong with Brutus and Cassius in the lowest depths of Hell. Yet Dante has given him a place outside Hell, as guardian of the realm of the saved. It may have been Virgil’s identification of Cato as lawgiver of the virtuous souls in Elysium (Aeneid 8.670) that first suggested Dante’s use of him as guardian here. Cato, it seems, has been called from

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Limbo specifically for this task, and perhaps this is less surprising than it might be, since the pagan Virgil has the duty of guiding Dante through this realm. But in line 75 Virgil seems to imply that Cato—who will wear a “radiant” garment on the last day—will ultimately be received into Paradise. Dante may view Cato’s suicide in terms of his own Stoic ethic and see it as a positive statement of the love of freedom. He may view Cato as the embodiment of the cardinal virtues that shine so brightly in his face. It may be also that Cato is a perfect symbol of forgiving love, since he welcomed his wife, Marcia, back after she had married another man. Since the effect of Purgatory is the ultimate freedom from sin, and since the cardinal virtues will be important in the purging of those sins, and moreover since God’s forgiving love makes Purgatory possible for repentant sinners, Cato thus becomes the perfect allegorical symbol to guard the holy mountain. The eventual salvation of Cato alluded to by Virgil transcends all of this, however, and cannot be explained by orthodox theology. There is room for miracles and special dispensations in Dante’s eternal world, however, as the case of TRAJAN (MARCUS ULPIUS TRAJANUS) will demonstrate in Canto 10. Ultimately that may be the most satisfying explanation for Cato’s extraordinary treatment here. Dante’s elaborate description of the sunrise that opens Canto 2 reminds us that it is sunset on the other side of the world in Jerusalem—and that it is midnight on the Ganges, the easternmost point of human habitation in Dante’s geography. This all serves to emphasize the point that of the three realms of the afterlife, Purgatory is the only one that exists in time. Therefore time and the passage of time are major preoccupations of this second canticle of the Comedy. The specific time of Canto 2 is sunrise (6:00 A.M.) on Easter Sunday, 1300. This gives special significance to the hymn that the newly arrived souls are singing. In exitu Israel de Aegypto is the opening of Psalm 114 (“When Israel went out from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language”), a song of thanksgiving to the Lord for freeing Israel from bondage in Egypt. Medieval Christians saw this deliverance as prefiguring

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Christ’s resurrection from the bondage of death, precisely what is celebrated on Easter Sunday. For Dante the significance goes further. In his “Letter to Can Grande” Dante uses this particular verse to illustrate the four different levels on which his own text was to be interpreted. On the literal level the line denoted the deliverance of the Israelites in Moses’ time; on the allegorical level Christ’s resurrection was signified. Further, Dante explains to Can Grande, on the moral level the line suggests how Christ’s sacrifice frees each individual soul from the bondage of sin. Finally on the anagogical level the text suggests the soul’s escape from the bondage of the physical world to the freedom of eternal bliss. This theme of freedom from bondage will continue throughout Purgatory and helps explain the use of Cato, martyr to freedom, as this realm’s guardian. The angel boatman who guides the souls to Purgatory’s shore parallels the role of Charon, boatman of the Acheron who ferries the damned into Hell in Canto 3 of the Inferno. But the description of the angel’s speed also recalls that of Phlegyas, boatman of the Styx in Inferno 8, whose boat shoots across the water like an arrow. Finally the account of the angel’s boat also echoes that of Ulysses’ last voyage (Inferno 26): not only does the angel’s boat retrace the route that took Ulysses five months to travel, but the description of the angel’s wings (ll. 25–26) also calls to mind Ulysses’ description of his crew’s oars as wings (Inferno 26, l. 125). These kinds of echoes of and parallels with the Inferno will continue through the poem. Dante will also allude to his own earlier poetry several times in the Purgatorio, beginning here with Casella’s rendition of Dante’s canzone Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona. While in the CONVIVIO Dante interprets this poem allegorically, identifying the lady of the poem with Philosophy, here it seems clear that it is perceived as a love song. Dante depicts his verses as having the power to hold Casella’s listeners in rapt attention. But Cato’s interruption makes it clear that there is something negligent in their pausing to listen. Art and music, as well as the romantic love celebrated in this song, as other humanistic pursuits, may be valuable in the physical world, but here they only distract the

newly arrived shades from what must be their single purpose: purging their sins and restoring their souls to God’s pure likeness. This may also explain Cato’s brusque dismissal of Virgil when he mentions Cato’s wife, Marcia, in Canto 1: Like art, family ties must be subordinate to spiritual concerns in Purgatory, and Marcia is, after all, in Hell. The figure of Casella raises an important issue. Dante’s affection for the musician is clear—in a scene that alludes to Aeneas’s threefold attempt to embrace his dead wife’s shade in the second book of the Aeneid (ll. 792–794), the pilgrim tries to hold Casella. Yet Dante has clearly made Casella tardy in his arrival in Purgatory. Denied passage from the angel at first, Casella says that in the past three months the angel boatman has been taking everyone. Scholars believe this alludes to POPE BONIFACE VIII’s plenary indulgence, declared for any who made a pilgrimage to Rome during the Jubilee Year of 1300. Though the indulgence did not extend to departed souls, Dante may be following a popular tradition by including Casella in the general pardon. But the real question is, Why has Casella been held back so long? The answer is probably the nature of Purgatory itself. The souls in Dante’s Purgatory are not condemned to suffer for any particular length of time; rather they pass through the different kinds of penance of their own will, staying at each level as long as they consider necessary to make themselves clean of each sin. Souls in Purgatory move on when they are ready; if Casella has just now arrived, it is because he was not ready to begin his purgation until now. Readers who have just finished the scene in which the pilgrim Dante has kicked the apparently quite solid head of BOCCA DEGLI ABATI in Canto 32 of the Inferno may be surprised to read Virgil’s analysis in Canto 3 of the diaphanous bodies of shades in the afterlife. Virgil does say that these ethereal bodies can suffer pain, and one might explain such scenes in the Inferno in that way, suggesting that the solidity of Bocca’s head is illusory. Or one might simply acknowledge, as some scholars do, that Dante is sometimes inconsistent if it suits his purpose in an individual canto. In any case a more thorough explanation of the nature of spiritual bodies will occur in Canto 25.

Purgatorio Perhaps more important in Virgil’s discourse are his comments on the limits of human reason: Human beings simply cannot expect to understand some metaphysical questions. The innate desire for truth and for knowledge of God that the great philosophers manifested was not enough to place them among the elect. This is true, Virgil acknowledges, of Plato and Aristotle as well as “many others” (l. 44), after which he bows his head in anguish. It is clear that Virgil himself is among those “others,” and that here among the souls of the blessed, he must feel the pang of his eternal damnation to Limbo more sharply than ever before. As Dante advances up the mountain of Purgatory, the figure of Virgil will arouse the reader’s pity more and more. In Canto 3 Dante and Virgil meet the first group of late repentant souls who people the section of the mountain beneath the gate that leads into Purgatory proper. This is the Ante-Purgatory, or the area before Purgatory. Here the souls who waited until the end of their lives to turn to God now wait for their chance to climb the mountain and be purged of their sins. The waiting is not a punishment in the sense of the varied punishments of the Inferno. Rather it is a purgation. The misplaced priorities that led these souls to postpone turning to God must be eliminated. A delay of several hundred years before climbing the mountain to begin the trek toward Heaven is sure to whet the appetites of those forced to wait so long. In a sense this strategy has been prefigured in the previous canto: When the newly arrived souls stopped to pay attention to Casella’s song, their attention was turned from their primary goal. But upon Cato’s rebuke, they began to rush eagerly toward the mountain. That kind of eagerness will surely characterize the late repentant when they are finally released from their long wait. The first group of late repentant souls is characterized as comprising the “contumacious,” a term that denotes disobedience to the authority of the church. Most are excommunicate. Their extremely slow movement seems to be simply a physical image of their agonizing wait. It should be noted that when Dante and Virgil turn to their left to approach the group, the crowd of souls motions for

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the poets to turn the other way and move ahead. In the Inferno the poets traveled consistently to the left, or clockwise around each circle. Here the proper direction is to the right—an example of the traditional negative associations attached to the left, or “sinister,” side. Certainly Dante’s placing of Manfred, the excommunicate enemy of three successive popes, in Purgatory was a bold move that must have surprised many of his first readers. Dante emphasizes the infinite mercy of God for the truly repentant sinner. The poet also introduces at the end of Canto 3 the theme of intercession that will be reiterated throughout this section of the Purgatorio. Dante follows orthodox doctrine by asserting that the prayers of faithful Christians can help those in Purgatory, particularly that they can lessen the time of waiting for the late repentant souls in Ante-Purgatory. Canto 4 begins with an apparent digression concerning the unity of the soul, a question of concern for Scholastic philosophers of the High Middle Ages. Plato had proposed the idea that human beings possessed three separate souls: a vegetative one, which was seated in the liver and governed life and growth; a sensitive one, which was seated in the heart and governed movement and emotion; and an intellective one, which was seated in the brain and governed human reason. While Aristotle modified Plato’s concept somewhat, it was SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS who reconciled this classical doctrine with orthodox Christianity: Each person has a single soul, Aquinas maintained (for in a Christian sense, it would be unjust for three separate souls to be subject to the same ultimate judgment), but that single soul is constituted of three separate faculties—the vegetative, sensitive, and intellective. Aquinas’s proof of this was that the soul, if strongly preoccupied with one function, might completely ignore the others. Separate souls, he argued, would preserve their independence. In his discussion of pain, Aquinas says: Since all the powers of the soul are rooted in the one essence of the soul, it must needs happen, when the intention of the soul is strongly drawn towards the action of one power, that it is withdrawn from the action of another power: because the soul, being one, can only have one

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intention. The result is that if one thing draws upon itself the entire intention of the soul, or a great portion thereof, anything else requiring considerable attention is incompatible therewith. (Summa theologica I–II, q. 37, a. 1)

Dante uses his conversation with Manfred, which has so distracted him that he has failed completely to notice the passage of time, as another such proof of the unity of the soul. For some readers this Scholastic discussion may seem out of place, an interruption of the forward thrust of the narrative. But it should be noted that even as the Comedy is an allegory of the individual soul’s journey to salvation, it is also a fictional verification of the truth of orthodox Christian doctrine, and as the pilgrim ascends higher and higher toward the beatific vision at the climax of the Paradiso, he will engage more and more in theological questions. The allegorical significance of the narrow passageway in the rock face through which the poets begin their ascent is clear to those familiar with the Gospels: “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it,” advises Christ in Matthew 7.13–14 (NRSV). The moral allegory of the poets’ struggle through this narrow fissure is implied, as well, by Virgil’s explanation of how the mountain is most difficult to climb at the beginning but becomes easier the higher one ascends: It is the initial turn from sin to repentance that is the most difficult. The habit of a faithful life becomes easier the longer one stays in it, and easiest of all when one receives the perfection of God’s grace. The souls Dante encounters in this canto, represented by the lazy Belacqua, are those who never advanced beyond the first turning to God in their earthly lives. These indolent shades are forced to wait in Ante-Purgatory, as were the contumacious. But the waiting period for the indolent is much shorter—they are only stalled on this ledge for the same length of time they waited to turn from sin in their lives on earth. But again we are reminded that the prayers of the faithful might lessen the waiting time for the indolent.

Virgil’s impatience at the conclusion of Canto 4 seems motivated by his observing in Dante signs of the indolence that affects the souls here. The pilgrim had lost sight of his goal in talking with Manfred at the beginning of the canto and now seems willing to wait on the ledge with Belacqua, resting for some undefined period. Virgil reminds Dante that it is already noon on Easter Sunday, and it is time to move on. The souls Dante encounters in Canto 5 have all died violently, but each, on the point of death, turned to God with sincere repentance. Now they are in Ante-Purgatory and, as the indolent and excommunicate below them, must wait before beginning their purgation. Unlike the last two groups however these penitents display their eagerness to be on their way by the speed that accompanies their actions. Two of them rush forward to greet Dante and rush back with the news that he is alive—at which the entire crowd presses forward, eager to have him beg the living for intercessory prayers. This group sings the Miserere, one of the seven penitential psalms. From this point on each group of souls in Purgatory will chant its own appropriate prayer. In this case it is Psalm 51, whose first verses express precisely the mood of the late repentant sinners in this group: Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. (Psalm 51.1–3, NRSV)

This psalm, regularly sung as part of the Office of the Dead, was also spoken by a priest conducting absolution for an excommunicate who has died but has shown signs of contrition before his death. Such an absolution would entitle the deceased to Christian burial. This parallels the situation of the late repentant sinners of this group—they were not excommunicate, but they certainly seemed unlikely to be saved before their deathbed conversions. In any case the sentiments of the psalm—asking God in his great mercy to cleanse

Purgatorio    109 one from sin—are appropriate for any of the souls in Purgatory. Two of the souls who approach the pilgrim in this canto are intended to contrast sharply with particular sinners in the Inferno. First Buonconte da Montefeltro’s description of the struggle between the angel and devil for his soul surely should recall the similar struggle between the devil and Saint Francis for the soul of Buonconte’s father, Guido, in Canto 27 of the Inferno. In the latter case Guido had retired from military life to become a friar, trying to prepare his soul for salvation. He broke his vows through his evil counsel when Pope Boniface absolved him in advance, and he died trusting in the pope’s absolution. But the devil drags him to Hell anyway, arguing that he could not be forgiven while he still intended to sin. In Buonconte’s case the devil argues that his single little tear cannot be enough to undo a life of sin. But in fact since the tear indicates sincere repentance, Buonconte’s dying invocation of the Virgin Mary is enough to save him. Thus Dante makes it clear that the outward forms of religion (e.g., the pope’s absolution) are ineffective where there is no genuine inner contrition. “La Pia” is a character who, after the lengthy narration of Buonconte’s dramatic death, provides a humble and gentle counterpart. Her four unaffected lines tell a much simpler story. One assumes that since she needed a last-minute conversion to be saved, she was sinful in life. Dante probably sees her as an adulterous woman, as at least some commentators suggest that her husband’s suspicions of her unfaithfulness led to her murder. But Pia’s comments here are all courteous and self-effacing. Her use of the article la with her name gives an air of intimacy to her speech, since (as Singleton points out in his edition) she is speaking the way one would if he were talking about her, rather than to her (2, 107). Her kindness and thoughtfulness are revealed by her entreaty that the pilgrim ask people to pray for her only after he has had a chance to rest from his own difficult journey. Almost certainly Pia is meant to contrast with Francesca da Rimini, who appears at just this point (Canto 5) of the Inferno. Francesca, the only other woman to speak with the pilgrim thus far in the Comedy, was

also a woman killed by her husband because of an adulterous affair. But where Francesca’s account is long, self-aggrandizing, and rhetorically complex, designed to win the pilgrim’s sympathy while settling responsibility for her sins everywhere but on herself, Pia’s account is brief and self-effacing, asking only for prayers. Francesca’s self-centered failure of self-knowledge has earned her a place in Hell. Pia’s sincere kindness and humility are a part of her salvation. As he did in Canto 4, Dante devotes much of the early part of Canto 6 to a theological question: Since so many of the souls in Purgatory emphasize the efficacy of intercessory prayer, the pilgrim wants to know why Virgil denied the effectiveness of prayer in the Aeneid. Dante is no doubt referring to the passage of Virgil’s (6.373–376) in which Aeneas, on his visit to Hades, finds his

Buonconte da Montefeltro, from Canto 5 of the Purgatorio, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Para­dise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

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drowned pilot Palinurus languishing on the bank of the Styx. Because he is unburied, the gods have denied him passage over the river into the land of the dead. The shade of Palinurus pleads with Aeneas to ferry him over the river into Hades. But Aeneas’s guide the Sybil chastises the shade, telling him that human prayer cannot change the decrees of the gods. Virgil tells Dante that this assertion applied only to those souls who are not united with God (i.e., pagans, the damned, and those otherwise outside God’s grace). The prayers of those in a state of grace are expressions of holy love, which is never contrary to divine justice. Therefore a loving prayer can, in one instant, cancel the penitential debt of a shade waiting in Ante-Purgatory. But grace is a subject beyond the limits of reason; therefore Virgil, as the figure of reason, advises Dante to wait until he sees Beatrice at the top of the mountain to be completely satisfied on such questions. The pilgrim’s passionate response to the sound of Beatrice’s name, and his eager desire to push forward to the mountaintop, are sure to be read literally as Dante’s ardent wish to see his beloved Beatrice once more. But on an allegorical level the passage may be read as the pilgrim’s turning from the worldly matters that have held back the laterepentant sinners from beginning their own journey up the mountain, and a renewed zeal for what the figure of Beatrice represents: divine love or grace. The figure of Sordello is clearly an important one. He is the first soul in Purgatory who is presented alone, rather than as a part of a group. He sits with a haughty, disdainful air, hardly acknowledging the poets until he learns that Virgil hails from his own hometown of Mantua. Some critics have seen Sordello’s stately bearing as reminiscent of the souls in Limbo (Inferno 4, ll. 112–114), and thus as foreshadowing Sordello’s welcome of Virgil (one of those residents of Limbo) as a kindred spirit. But others have seen Sordello’s aloofness and contemptuous demeanor as paralleling FARINATA in Canto 10 of the Inferno. Both Farinata and Sordello are political figures, and both cantos contain political prophecies. Ultimately both look forward to another solitary figure of great majesty, that of Dante’s ancestor CACCIAGUIDA in Canto 15 of the

Paradiso, who pronounces the ultimate political prophecy of the poem. Sordello’s reputation for political integrity seems based chiefly on his complaint on the death of the Provençal lord Blacatz of Aups. In it Sordello laments the passing of Blacatz as the last representative of true chivalry, and he rebukes eight other European princes for their political failings. The tone of that poem no doubt underlies Dante’s outburst on the current political situation that ends this canto. When Sordello embraces his fellow Mantuan, Virgil, that simple act of fraternal love—precisely the element that is lacking in Italy’s current political environment—sends Dante into a tirade. Here the poet, speaking in his own voice, stops the narrative for 76 lines of scathing invective. Italy, he says, is like a wild beast, a horse without a rider or the bridle that could be provided by imperial law. The cities of Italy are ruled by tyrants, and behind the walls built to keep danger out, citizens devour one another like animals. Feuds between families and parties tear the Italian cities apart— Dante specifically mentions the Montecchi and Cappelletti of Cremona (Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets). The poet lashes out at the two main causes of all this strife. The first is the church. He has already (in Inferno 19, ll. 115–117) asserted that corruption entered the church when it acquired wealth and power from the Donation of Constantine. Now he attacks the clergy for their interference in secular affairs and charges that, by ignoring Christ’s mandate to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s (Matthew 22.21), they have allowed the political situation to spin out of control (ll. 93–99). The second cause of the problem is the emperor. Italy’s internal wars are caused by a lack of central authority. The Emperor could provide that authority. But the emperor at the fictional date of the Comedy, the German Albert of Hapsburg (elected emperor in 1298), was so preoccupied with events in the north that he never even visited Italy. His negligence has allowed the Italian lords to make war on one another with impunity, and this situation has destroyed the Italian people.

Purgatorio The poet’s diatribe concludes with a bitterly sarcastic attack on his own city. Florence is the perfect exemplar of the vicious civil strife and corruption he has described infecting Italy in general. Florentines merely talk of justice but never demonstrate it. They seek public office only when they believe they will profit from it. They change their laws from one month to another. In a final memorable image Dante says that Florence is like a sick woman, tossing and turning in her bed and unable to find any rest or comfort. Sordello’s effusive praise of Virgil at the beginning of Canto 7 is curious: It is as if for Sordello Virgil’s earthly reputation is more significant than the fate of his soul, which Virgil makes clear is condemned to Limbo for eternity. Overall Sordello’s position here in Ante-Purgatory is puzzling. If he is for the moment confined to this space on the mountain, he must be numbered among the late repentant. Yet he seems to belong to no particular group. He guides the pilgrims to the Valley of Princes, where (in tones that echo his famous lament on the death of Blacatz) he comments on the Negligent Rulers, sometimes pointing out failings in their political lives. But Sordello is not a part of this group; nor is he a part of the group that died violent deaths introduced in the previous canto. Perhaps his enthusiastic greeting of Virgil and his concern with the political lives of the princes suggest that he, like the princes themselves, was too involved in worldly affairs to focus adequately on his spiritual life. But since he is not a prince himself, he stands alone. When Sordello explains to the pilgrims the law that governs movement in Purgatory, we are reminded again that Purgatory is the one realm of the afterlife that exists in time. Night falls and day dawns in this realm, and according to the divine plan, the souls cannot move up the mountain at night, though they can move down if they wish. On the literal level, of course, this makes some sense because of the difficulty of climbing in the dark, but there is a clear allegorical intent as well: Throughout the Comedy God is associated with light. Hell is consistently dark, and Heaven will be eternally light. But here in Purgatory, as on earth, light and dark alternate. If God is in fact symbolized by the sun, as Virgil implies in line 26 when he calls God

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“the high Sun you seek,” then the allegorical point of this law must be that without the grace of God, the soul cannot engage in true penance or progress toward salvation. One can, however, backslide—go down the mountain—at any time. When Sordello guides the poets to the edge of the Valley of Princes, they hear the souls in the valley singing the well-known antiphon Salve Regina (“Hail, Queen”). This is traditionally a hymn for compline (the service performed at dusk or immediately after dusk). Therefore it is appropriate that the souls sing it at this particular time, and in doing so this community of faithful souls aligns itself with the community of the living church in the world, which would sing the identical song at dusk in its own hemisphere. In addition the words of the hymn, addressed to the Virgin Mary as our heavenly advocate, reflect the state of the souls in this valley—marked for salvation but not yet able to begin their purgation. Ad te suspiramus (“To you we sigh”), the singers pray to the Virgin, gementes et flentis in hac lacrimarum valle (“groan and weep in this valley of tears”). The eight princes whom Sordello points out to the pilgrims are all important European leaders from the mid- to late 13th century, some of whom the poet Sordello would have known (he had been in the retinue of Charles of Anjou, for example, when Charles marched against Manfred). The pairings and positions of the princes are suggestive and sometimes ironic: The Emperor, Rudolph of Hapsburg, sits higher than anyone else and is comforted by Ottakar II of Bohemia, his greatest enemy in life. The “snubnosed one,” Philip III (“the Bold”) of France, laments with the “kind-looking” one, Henry (“the Fat”) of Navarre, over the evil done by Philip’s son (who is Henry’s son-in-law), France’s Philip IV. The one with the “big nose” (Charles of Anjou) is singing with the “sturdy looking” one (Pedro III of Aragon), who in life took over Charles’s kingdom of Sicily. Henry III of England—whom Sordello had castigated in his poem on Blacatz—sits alone (probably because, of all the princes named, he is the only one not involved in the Holy Roman Empire), and William VII sits lower than the rest—as a marquis, he was lower in rank than the others.

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Commentators have generally seen these rulers as “negligent” in the sense that they were too preoccupied with political events to focus on the spiritual and are therefore placed among the late repentant. However since their worldly responsibilities were divinely ordained (since they ruled by the will of God), their late repentance was mitigated somewhat, and they are placed higher on the mountain than their late-repentant subjects. But there are difficulties with this reading: England’s Henry III, for example, was known as a pious but weak king (in his poem to Blacatz Sordello berates Henry for having little courage and for losing his lands to the king of France). Clearly Henry’s failing was neglect of his secular responsibilities, not his spiritual ones. Here Dante also has Sordello complain—echoing Dante’s own political tirade of the previous canto—that the Emperor Rudolph could have cured the ills of Italy if he had wished. Thus the negligent rulers might be negligent in different senses. In all cases rulers have the Godgiven responsibility of securing and maintaining the welfare of the commonwealth as well as their own souls. Being neglectful of either of these duties will bar a prince from immediate entry into Purgatory and land him in this valley. The compline hymn Te lucis ante would have been very familiar in Dante’s time, and Dante would have expected his readers to be thinking of the entire hymn: The prayer asks for God’s protection during the night, to shield us from evil or sinful dreams and to restrain our enemy (Hostemque nostrum comprime). This latter line is especially relevant to the situation of this canto, for the “enemy” will soon appear in the form of a serpent, which God’s angels will frighten off. The hymn, as the earlier Salve Regina, reflects the daily life of Christians on earth—having the opening lines sung by a single voice, later joined by all of the others, imitates the practice of a monastic service. But the hymn is really not relevant to the situation of the souls in the Valley of Princes: they cannot sleep (we are about to discover); nor can they be tempted (since they are already saved). Yet the entire group, including the pilgrim Dante, stands enraptured by the music. The scene recalls the pilgrim’s reaction to Casella’s song in Canto 2, but here the response

is much more appropriate. Dante the poet evokes the emotional power of music but also contrasts the “old song” (the music of the flesh) with the “new song” (the music of the spirit). The souls’ saved condition may explain their reaction to the angelic drama that is played out before them in this canto. The pilgrim Dante is frightened at the approach of the serpent and fascinated by the angels’ repulsion of the adversary. But the souls of the valley seem to pay no attention, and Corrado Malaspina, apparently indifferent to the action around him, never takes his eyes off Dante during the entire scene (ll. 109–111). Perhaps this indifference is the result of their witnessing the same scene every night. Or perhaps it is simply that the battle against the serpent has already been fought and won by Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection; therefore the outcome of this reenactment is a foregone conclusion. Perhaps it is a reflection of the fact that the souls are already saved and therefore are in no danger from the fiend. If that is the case, though, why should God continue to send the angels every night? The answer seems to lie in the souls’ earlier spellbound attention to the song, anticipating the angels’ arrival: That moment, as Musa says in his edition, is for the onlookers “a never-failing sign of God’s grace” (Purgatory 93). Once it is over, the defeat of the serpent is taken for granted. The scene enacted by the angels and the serpent is, however, especially significant for the reader. Dante makes this clear by addressing the reader directly (the first of seven such apostrophes in the course of the Purgatorio), drawing attention to the veiled or allegorical meaning of the narrative to come. Everything about the angelic episode seems to be symbolic: The angels recall the cherubim of Genesis 3.24, who bar all access to Paradise and the Tree of Life. Their swords are blunted, perhaps as a sign that God’s justice has been tempered with his mercy, because Christ has now opened Paradise, or perhaps because they are not really needed against the serpent, who has already been vanquished. The serpent is the tempter of Eve, and the angels are said to be sent from the bosom of Mary—the Virgin in medieval theology had specifically annulled the sin of Eve. The angels are green, the color of hope,

Purgatorio suggesting the souls’ hope of Heaven soon to be realized. These relations are part of the typological meaning of the passage. But recalling the four levels of allegory on which the Comedy functions, it may be the moral level Dante is most interested in here. His address to the reader to look beneath the veil (l. 19) calls to mind the similar warning he gave in Canto 9 of the Inferno—the canto exactly parallel to this one in the first canticle (considering the Inferno’s Canto 1 as an introduction to the Comedy as a whole). In the Inferno the warning occurs as Dante and Virgil wait outside the gates of Dis, stymied by the rebel angels, who call forth MEDUSA to turn Dante to stone—until the angel arrives from Heaven and opens the gate. In the current canto the serpent threatens to enter the garden, frightening Dante, until the two angels descend and drive off the enemy. Again Mark Musa’s explanation of these parallel scenes makes the most sense: Dante is utilizing the medieval tradition of the “three advents of Christ.” The first advent—his incarnation, passion, and crucifixion—culminates in the Harrowing of Hell, an event allegorically recreated by the angel’s entrance into Hell in Canto 9 of the Inferno. The second advent of Christ—that which suggests moral allegory—is his daily incarnation in the hearts of individual Christians, for the purpose of protecting them from temptation. This daily advent is reenacted here in Canto 8 of the Purgatorio. The third advent of Christ—his coming in glory to judge the living and the dead—seems allegorically represented in Canto 30 of the Purgatorio, when Beatrice descends to judge the pilgrim in the Earthly Paradise. Two other points in Canto 8 are particularly worth noting. The first is the commentary on Nino Visconti’s wife. Nino chides his widow for her willingness to remarry, implying that she will live to regret her decision, and the pilgrim Dante seems to concur that Nino’s wife should have remained unmarried. These sentiments are influenced chiefly by the medieval attitude that women remarried because they could not keep in check their lustful natures. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, with her five marriages, was for some a monster of self-indulgence. But unless this discussion is simply a digression, it

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seems that Dante may intend an allegorical interpretation of this passage: Nino’s complaint may recall that of the prophet Hosea, who takes a whore for a wife. The unfaithful wife is compared to Israel forsaking the Lord, but the lord ultimately takes Israel back after chastising her. Similarly Nino’s wife may suggest, on one level, the church (particularly under popes like Boniface) whoring after riches and secular power, which must be cleansed and restored to its true dedication to God; or on another level the human soul, which may turn from God—as the souls in Ante-Purgatory have done— but is accepted and loved by God when it turns back to him, even if that occurs, as with many of these souls, at the very last minute. The other point to note is Dante’s view of the stars. He now sees three bright stars above the South Pole. In the morning he had seen four different stars. Commentators agree that the four stars represent the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance), and the three stars here suggest the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity). The cardinal virtues may be acquired by human beings and even become habitual (as Dante suggests they are in the Malaspina family later in this canto, ll. 130–132), and hence are attainable by all people, Christian or pagan. But the theological virtues can only be attained through divine grace, and it is only through them that the human will is directed toward God. It is appropriate that the theological virtues appear to the pilgrim here, as he is about to enter the gate into Purgatory proper and the path toward God. He leaves behind the more worldly atmosphere of Ante-Purgatory, where, as in the world itself, the cardinal virtues are more prominent. In Canto 29 the seven virtues appear together in the great pageant that accompanies Beatrice’s descent to the Earthly Paradise—though they appear not as stars but as dancing heavenly ladies (29, ll. 121–132). Like Canto 9 in the Inferno (where Dante and Virgil enter the city of Dis), the Purgatorio’s ninth Canto is a transitional one, in which Dante crosses the boundary from Ante-Purgatory into Purgatory proper. As in the Inferno this is a complex canto in which the narrator feels the need to draw the

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reader’s attention to the allegorical complexity of his narrative (ll. 70–72). Dante will spend three nights on Mount Purgatory, each of which will end with a prophetic dream just before dawn. The first half of this Canto concerns the pilgrim’s first dream and its accompanying classical allusions, all of which have proved to be exceptionally controversial. Briefly the dream occurs near dawn—a time when, according to medieval tradition, dreams are most likely to have prophetic power. Leading into his account of the dream, Dante establishes the time by two classical allusions with sensual and violent overtones: Aurora, goddess of dawn, rises from the bed of her aging human lover, the Trojan prince Tithonus. Near dawn the swallow sings her sad song, recalling the history of Philomela, who was raped by Tereus (her sister Procne’s husband) and (in the version Dante knew) later transmuted into a swallow. At this point Dante dreams of his violent seizure by the heavenly eagle and rapid ascent into the sphere of fire, where he begins to burn and awakens in fright, an episode Dante likens to Jove’s rape of Ganymede in the form of an eagle. On one level the dream is the pilgrim’s unconscious transformation of the experience his sleeping body is actually undergoing—SAINT LUCY is carrying him up the mountain to the gate of Purgatory. The dream also looks forward to events that will happen further on—principally the wall of fire through which the pilgrim will have to pass to enter the Earthly Paradise in Canto 27. There, as here, the pilgrim will shrink back in fear. The eagle clearly suggests divine power, and commentators have suggested that it represents grace, specifically the illuminating grace symbolized by Saint Lucy (the grace that helps move the pilgrim ahead in his journey). After all the eagle in the dream does symbolize Lucy, and the eagle of Jove that it recalls for the pilgrim did carry Ganymede into the presence of the gods. More recent commentators have seen the eagle as a symbol of the empire, a function eagles have at other points in the Comedy (most notably in Canto 18 of the Paradiso). Thus the dream might suggest that Dante has been specially chosen to proclaim the important role of the empire in God’s universal plan. But that

interpretation seems a stretch considering the context of the dream. What many commentators fail to mention is the sexual nature of the vision. The images of sensuality and of violent rape that surround the dream contrast sharply with the tender maternal “reality” of Saint Lucy’s benevolent transportation of the pilgrim to the gates of Purgatory. Yet the Te lucis ante hymn sung by the shades in Canto 8 contained a specific petition for protection from wicked dreams. Surely the suggestive imagery in this dream is no accident. One interpretation of this sensuality is that it portrays the pilgrim as still burdened by the sinful nature of his flesh and needing the purification that Purgatory will provide. Further the frightening nightmare manifests the unconscious fears that the pilgrim is experiencing on this journey— fears that stem from his human nature. The narrator’s aforementioned address to the reader (ll. 70–72) seems to draw special attention to the allegorical meaning of the gate into Purgatory, particularly its guardian angel with sword and keys and the steps that lead up to the gate. The angel with the naked sword recalls, once again, the cherubim guarding the gates of Paradise in Genesis 3.24. The ashen color of the angel’s robes is traditionally associated with humility and with contrition. It also suggests Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season of penance in preparation for Easter. When the angel accosts Dante and asks, “Where is your guide?” (l. 86) he seems to parallel the previous guardian figure of Cato, who in Canto 1 had asked the pilgrim, “Who guided you?” (l. 43). When the angel follows this with the warning to Dante “Beware, you may regret your coming here” (l. 87), it may recall Minos’s warning “Be careful how you enter and whom you trust: / it is easy to get in, but don’t be fooled!” (Inferno 5, ll. 19–20). These parallels with previous liminal figures serve to define this angel as marking an important threshold Dante is about to cross. As for the three steps leading to the gate scholars are agreed that they symbolize the three stages of the sacrament of penance: Catholic theology defines these steps as contrition of the heart (the recognition and genuine rejection of sin), confession of the mouth (the expression of remorse made

Purgatorio    115 to a priest), and satisfaction (the promise of an act of penance to be performed, in order to demonstrate the sincerity of the contrition). These steps should culminate in absolution by the priest, who grants forgiveness conditional upon the performance of the penance. There is some disagreement as to which of Dante’s steps correspond to which specific stage of the sacrament. The first step—polished white marble—forms a mirror for the sinner’s self-examination. This could imply the recognition of sin that characterizes contrition, though some scholars believe it symbolizes the self-revelation of confession. The second step, crumbling and nearly black, might suggest the emotional trauma brought on by a true confession, or it might indicate the sinner’s recognition of his own inner brokenness that is sincere contrition. All are agreed that the bloodred third step represents satisfaction by works: The red recalls Christ’s sacrifice, an act of charity that provided satisfaction for all the sins of the world. Since penitential acts are meant to be acts of charity, the third step in the sacrament imitates the sacrifice of Christ. As for whether Dante means for the order of the steps to be contrition, confession, and satisfaction, or confession, contrition, and satisfaction, it might be worth asking why Dante would change the traditional order of the sacrament. For some the altered order reflects Dante’s penance before Beatrice in Canto 31, which begins with his confession and moves into contrition. But a close reading of that canto seems to indicate that the pilgrim is feeling deep contrition before the confession of his lips. I would suggest that there is no particular reason to see Dante’s steps as unorthodox. On the colors of the step, Robert Durling (in his Oxford edition of the poem) sees the sequence of white, black, and red as a brief synopsis of Christian salvation history: from the white of innocence, to the black of sin, to the red of Christ’s redemption. The guardian angel becomes an ecclesiastical figure in this allegory of penance. He is keeper of the keys, which he says he received from Saint Peter. These are the keys of Matthew 16.18–19 that symbolize the authority granted to the church to open or close the Kingdom of Heaven. The silver key is usually taken to denote the priest’s

The Portals of Purgatory, from Canto 9 of the Purgatorio, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

discretionary judgment as to whether or not the penitent deserves absolution. The gold key represents the actual power to absolve. Both keys—one used after the other—are necessary to open the door to salvation. The seven p’s on the pilgrim’s brow stand for peccatum, the Latin word for “sin.” These are the seven deadly sins to which all Adam’s descendants are predisposed. In a chiefly moral allegory the angel as priest imposes on Dante the penance of going through the different terraces on the mountain, where he will be cleansed of each sin, one after the other. On each terrace he will be able to wash away one of the marks on his forehead. The canto ends, and the new stage of Dante’s journey begins, with the mysterious sound of the Te Deum laudamus: This ancient hymn, one of the oldest in the Christian Church, was attributed to Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, who were said

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to have sung it spontaneously on the occasion of Augustine’s baptism. In any case it probably dates from the fifth century. It is a song of thanksgiving celebrating the Trinity and was regularly sung on the occasion of a man’s entry into a religious order—thus it was traditionally a hymn marking a major spiritual transition. The line in the hymn most appropriate to the current occasion is the one that reads, Tu, devicto mortis aculeo, aperuisti credentibus regna caelorum (“When you overcame the sting of death, you opened for believers the Kingdom of Heaven”), the kingdom into which the pilgrim now passes.

LOWER PURGATORY (LOVE PERVERTED) (CANTOS 10–17) Synopsis Having passed through the gate into Purgatory, Dante hears the creaking door close behind him. Remembering the angel’s warning, he does not look back. He and Virgil begin a zigzagging climb through a steep and narrow passageway that Dante compares to the eye of a needle. When the poets finally reach a ledge, Dante must stop to rest, and neither of the pilgrims knows which way to go. Dante soon realizes that this first wide terrace is decorated with wondrous carvings in the white marble of the cliff face that constitutes the inner wall of the ledge. Created by the hand of God, the carvings outdo those of the great classical sculptor Polyclete—or even the works of Nature herself. There are three great carvings, each an example of the virtue of humility. The first depicts the annunciation, with the angel greeting Mary and the Virgin responding that she is the handmaid of God. The second scene, from the Old Testament book of Samuel, depicts King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant (and his proud wife, Michal, looking on with disdain from above). The third scene provides a classical example: The Roman emperor Trajan, leading his army, is stopped by a grieving widow who begs for justice for her murdered son. According to the legend Trajan recognized his responsibility to the widow and saw justice done before he left. Dante alludes as well to the intercession of GREGORY THE GREAT (POPE GREGORY I)—the pope’s prayer that, according to legend,

saved Trajan from Hell despite the emperor’s never having been baptized. As the pilgrim stands gazing at the stone carvings, Virgil draws his attention to a large group of souls approaching and suggests that perhaps this group can tell them how to move up to the next level. But before Dante describes these penitents, he addresses his readers: Do not abandon your repentance when you see the penance God demands, he tells his audience. Think not about the punishment but about the eternal blessing to which it leads. The narrator moves into an apostrophe to prideful Christians, reminding them that they are no more than worms. Then he describes the prideful: They are bent over and carry large boulders on their backs—the weight of the boulders varies, apparently according to the degree of the penitent’s guilt. But the souls under the weights seem scarcely able to go on. Canto 11 opens with the Lord’s Prayer as spoken by the souls of the proud. It expands on the words of the prayer, devoting roughly a tercet to each petition. The prayer moves through the petition to avoid temptation and “deliver us from him who urges evil” (l. 21) but then concludes with a clarification that this last request is made for those still in the world, rather than for themselves, since in Purgatory these souls are beyond temptation or evil. Dante observes that just as these souls pray for us on earth, we the living could do much good by praying for them in turn. Virgil addresses the encumbered souls moving slowly around this first round, asking them where to find the easiest way up the mountain—since, as he says, the pilgrim he is traveling with is still encumbered by the flesh of Adam. A voice from one of the downturned faces answers that there is an opening in the rock coming up on the right by which a living soul may ascend. The voice adds that if it were possible, he would lift his head from beneath the great weight he bears to see whether he recognizes the living man standing before him. He identifies himself as OMBERTO ALDOBRANDESCO and admits how in life he held all people in disdain. This kind of arrogance, he admits, has ruined his entire house, and now he is bearing the weight (humility) that he refused to accept in life. He will continue to do so, he says, until God is satisfied.

Purgatorio    117 Dante, who has been moving with the burdened souls, is bent over far enough to recognize the face of one of the other souls: It is Oderisi of Gubbio, a famous illuminator of manuscripts in Dante’s time. Oderisi, full of vanity in life, now admits that another painter, Franco Bolognese, is his superior and goes on to deliver a sustained meditation on earthly fame. Giovanni Cimabue (Cenni de Pepo), he says, was once the greatest painter but now has been surpassed by Giotto di Bondone. In poetry one Guido (Cavalcanti) has replaced another (Guinizelli), says Oderisi, and one is already living who will replace them both (presumably Dante himself). Fame is like the wind, and in time no one will remember whether you accomplished great things or died in your cradle. Oderisi then points to another of the burdened souls walking with them as an example of the transience of fame: Provenzan Salvani, the arrogant Ghibelline leader of Siena, once known throughout Tuscany but now hardly remembered even in Siena. The pilgrim is surprised to find Salvani here, rather than among the late-repentant sinners (assuming he repented late, Provenzan should have been delayed in Ante-Purgatory for at least the equivalent of his natural life, as Belacqua explains in Canto 4). Oderisi explains that at the height of his power Salvani humbled himself by begging in the marketplace of Siena in order to ransom a friend. This humility has brought the haughty Salvani to this point faster than expected. As for Dante himself Oderisi issues an obscure prophecy that Dante’s neighbors will soon show him what it means to be humbled. Dante moves along in the position of the humbled, bent over and speaking to Oderisi, until as Canto 12 opens Virgil calls to him to straighten up and move ahead. Before they leave the terrace of the proud, however, his guide tells the pilgrim to look down again. In the stone beneath his feet like tombs in the floor of a church are a series of carved representations of the proud being humbled. Here among other images both biblical and classical are portrayed the fall of Lucifer, the giant Briareus struck by Jove’s thunderbolt and in another panel other giants who warred on Olympus, Nimrod stunned at the tower of Babel, Niobe grieving for

her children, Saul dead on Mount Gilboa, Arachne turned to a spider, Rehoboam fleeing in his chariot, Eriphyle slain by her son for betraying her husband, Cyrus of Persia defeated by Tomyris, Sennacherib murdered by his sons, Holofernes’ death at the hands of Judith, and finally the fall of Troy. Virgil rouses Dante from his contemplation of these images, telling him that the sixth hour of the day (noon) has arrived and pointing out that the angel of humility is approaching. He instructs Dante to give the angel due reverence. The angel, with radiant face, opens his wings and with words of encouragement shows Dante and Virgil the path to the next level. As he is about to begin this path, the angel lightly brushes his wings against Dante’s brow, and as the two poets start to climb up, they hear chanted the beatitude “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

The Prideful—Oderisi, from Canto 12 of the Purgatorio, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

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As they climb the step to the next level, Dante comments that he feels lighter than when he climbed earlier to the terrace of pride. Virgil explains that since the angel has removed one of the p’s from his forehead, Dante is in fact lighter— and that when all the p’s have been removed, he will feel no weight at all. Dante reaches up to feel his brow and counts only six remaining marks. At this Virgil smiles. As Canto 13 opens, the poets reach the second terrace of the mountain. Here there are no carvings in the cliff or the path but only the bare blue-black rock face. Finding no spirits from whom to ask the way, Virgil says a brief prayer to the sunlight for guidance and then moves off with his charge. They have gone about a mile along the path when they begin to hear voices whispering to them the three examples of charity. The first of these, as usual, is from the life of the Virgin: It is the Latin sentence “They have no wine,” the words Mary spoke to Christ at the wedding feast of Cana (John 2.1–10), where she convinced him to turn water into wine for the wedding party. The second whispered words are “I am Orestes”—a classical example of words spoken by Pylades as he tried to save his friend Orestes from execution for the murder of Orestes’ mother, Clytemnestra. As the pilgrim turns to Virgil to ask what these voices are, he hears the commandment “Love your enemy.” Virgil responds that these are the examples—what he calls the “whip”—that oppose the sin of envy purged on this level. The “curb,” which they will witness later, will show examples of envy itself. Virgil now points ahead to a group of souls huddled against the cliff, covered in cloaks the color of the rock and leaning against one another reciting the Litany of the Saints. As Dante approaches the shades of the envious, he feels pity for them: They are clothed in rough haircloth like beggars, and Dante notes that their eyelids have been sewn shut with iron thread. Dante looks toward Virgil, who reads his thoughts and tells him to speak to one of the souls but to do it quickly. Dante turns to the blinded multitude and asks whether anyone there is Italian. One soul answers him, saying that all on this ledge are citizens of the one true city and suggests

that Dante meant to ask whether anyone here was once a pilgrim passing through Italy. Dante moves ahead to where the voice came from and sees one of the blind shades looking up expectantly. He asks her whether it was she who spoke, and she replies that she was once SAPIA OF SIENA (the aunt of Provenzan Salvani). Sapia tells the pilgrim her story: She was one, she says, who took more pleasure in the misfortunes of others than in her own happiness. She prayed for the defeat of the Sienese and her nephew Provenzan at the Battle of Colle and rejoiced when that defeat occurred. She says that she repented on her deathbed but that the prayers of the good Franciscan Pier Pettinaio allowed her to travel so quickly to this ledge. Sapia now asks Dante who he is, and he replies that he is a living man who will one day travel to this terrace. But the pilgrim says he does not expect to be long on the ledge of envy; his real fear is bearing his burden on the terrace of pride below. He offers to do something for her when he returns to the mortal world, and Sapia, moved by the abundant grace she recognizes Dante has received to make this journey, asks him to pray for her and to remember her to her kinsmen in Siena. Canto 14 opens with the conversation of two blind spirits crouching along the cliff face, excited by the unprecedented arrival of a living person on their level of Purgatory. As Dante overhears them, one of the souls raises his face and asks the pilgrim who he is and where he is from. Dante responds somewhat indirectly, saying he is from the shores of a river that runs more than 100 miles through Tuscany, from Falterona to the sea. His name, he says humbly, is of no matter, since he is as yet unknown on earth. One of the spirits recognizes the river as the Arno, and the other asks why Dante would conceal the river’s name as if it were shameful. The first spirit answers that the name of the Arno would be better lost, since the inhabitants of its shores are all beastlike men. The people of Casentino are swine, he says, and those of AREZZO snarling dogs that the river itself turns away from. The Florentines are wolves and the Pisans foxes. The wildness of the often-flooding river, says the speaker, reflects the

Purgatorio bestial inhabitants of Tuscany. As he speaks, the spirit has a prophetic vision in which he reveals how his companion spirit’s grandson—Fulcieri da Calboli—will soon dishonorably hunt down and kill the “wolves” of Florence. As Dante looks upon the pale face of the chagrined grandfather, he now asks the two spirits their names, and the speaker identifies himself as GUIDO DEL DUCA (a Ghibelline judge from Bertinoro) and his companion as RINIERI DE’ PAOLUCCI DA CALBOLI (a Guelph leader from Forlì). Guido laments that there is now no one in Rinieri’s family worthy to be that honorable man’s heir. In fact Guido goes on, none of the honorable men of Rinieri’s native Romagna have left worthy heirs. For some 27 lines Guido lists great men of Romagna (generally virtuous men of wealth and political or military power), now dead, and laments the current degeneracy of the entire area, including his hometown of Bertinoro. Guido ends his discourse bidding Dante to move on, saying he would rather weep than say more. As Dante and Virgil leave the souls of the envious behind, a crack like a thunderbolt rips the air, and Dante hears a voice cry, “I shall be slain by all who find me!” (l. 133). It is the voice of Cain, who murdered his brother out of envy and must suffer the consequences (Genesis 4.8–16). This is followed by the thunderous roar of another voice, this one saying, “I am Aglauros, who was turned to stone!” (l. 139). Aglauros, a princess of Athens, envied her sister’s love affair with the god Mercury and as a result was turned to stone (Metamorphoses 2.737–832). Dante turns to Virgil, who tells him this is the curb (or “rein”) of envy—examples of envy punished. Virgil ends the canto with a lament of his own (not unlike those of Guido del Duca earlier in the canto), this time for human beings in general who fail to learn to shun sin from the negative examples they see around them daily or to be inspired to love virtue by the beauty of God’s heavens. Canto 15 opens with a convoluted reference to the turning of the sphere of the Sun, indicating that it is currently 3:00 P.M. in Purgatory, and the pilgrim indicates that he and Virgil are walking westward toward the sun. Suddenly a light brighter

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than the sun forces him to shade his eyes with his hands, and Dante explains this with a complex description of how a ray of light is reflected—in this case directly into his eyes. The pilgrim asks Virgil what this light is that seems to be moving toward them, and the Roman poet answers that it is the angel come to show them the way to the next level. Before long, Virgil adds, such sights will not be so difficult for Dante’s eyes to withstand. Now standing before the angel, the poets are ushered to a stairway somewhat easier than the last, and as they begin climbing they hear behind them another beatitude: “Blessed are the merciful” (Matthew 5.7). (No beatitude specifically refers to charity, but mercy implies compassion for others, which does directly oppose the hatred of invidia.) As they climb, Dante asks Virgil about something that Guido del Duca had said to them: chastising his and others’ envy in an apostrophe to all mankind, Guido had asked why human beings “place your hopes/where partnership must always be denied?” (Canto 14, ll. 86–87). Virgil explains that Guido was referring to the human desire for things of this world, which cannot be shared because they are finite. If our love were for the things of Heaven, then we would have no such fear, for the more of us there are who possess heavenly treasure, the more there is to share. Dante cannot understand how something can become more plentiful the more it is shared, and Virgil responds that heavenly love is infinite and like a mirror reflecting light gives back to us as much as we give. If this explanation still does not satisfy him, Virgil says, Beatrice will answer all the pilgrim’s questions when he sees her. He urges Dante now to erase the five remaining wounds from his forehead as quickly as possible. By now the poets have arrived on the third terrace. Suddenly Dante is overpowered by a mystical vision of a crowded temple and the Virgin Mary whispering to the young Jesus that he has caused her and Joseph much worry. The second vision is of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus, soothing his wife’s anger as she tries to convince him to have their daughter’s suitor killed. The third vision shows Dante the stoning of Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who prays to God to forgive his executioners.

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As Dante emerges from his trance, Virgil asks what ails him, since he has been walking as if halfasleep for half a league. Dante answers that he will tell Virgil all that he has seen, but Virgil responds that he can easily read Dante’s mind and tells him that these visions were shown him to set his heart on peace. Virgil says that his reason for asking Dante what was wrong was to spur him on to move more quickly. Now the poets walk toward the setting sun, when suddenly they are shrouded in a thick black cloud of smoke. As Canto 16 opens, the pilgrim is choked and blinded by the heavy, acrid smoke of this terrace, and he holds on to Virgil’s shoulder for support as the Roman leads the way along the ledge. As they move along, Dante hears the souls of the wrathful singing the Agnus Dei, the litany to the Lamb of God. The voices sing in perfect harmony, in contrast to the sharp divisions their wrath caused in life. One of these souls calls out to Dante, asking who he is, since he speaks as if he were still alive. With Virgil’s encouragement the pilgrim invites this soul to walk with them, and the speaker agrees to move as far as he is allowed along the terrace. As they walk, Dante tells this new soul how God’s grace has enabled him while yet alive to climb through Hell and Purgatory to Heaven. The pilgrim then asks his new acquaintance his name and the way to the next circle. The shade responds that he is Marco Lombardo and that the poets are on the correct path to the next terrace. He then asks that Dante pray for him when the pilgrim has reached Heaven. Marco adds that in life he loved the good, lamenting that nowadays men no longer seek goodness. To this Dante reacts, asking Marco his opinion as to why virtue seems unknown in the contemporary world. Are the evil characters of men determined by the stars, Dante asks, or is there another cause? Sighing, Marco responds that the influence of the stars gives people certain tendencies but that all have free will and all have a mind given them by God to resist any malicious influence of the spheres. If the world has grown evil, Marco says, it is solely the fault of humans themselves. The human soul is born pure and loves all God’s creation but needs

guidance in the form of laws to channel that love in the right direction. At one time, Marco says, Rome provided such guidance in the form of two suns, one to light the physical world and one the spiritual world. But now the Roman leader desires to control both the temporal and the spiritual lives, and that usurpation of power has resulted in bad government and the contemporary degenerate state of Christian society. The church has thus defiled itself and deserted its ordained function. Marco mentions three men—Currado da Palazzo, Guido da Castel, and the good Gherardo—who embody the old virtues, and when Dante asks who this Gherardo is, Marco responds with surprise, assuming that everyone in Tuscany must know Gherardo, the father of Gaia. At that point the light of God’s angel begins to penetrate the smoke, and Marco must turn back. Following Virgil, the pilgrim Dante finally emerges from the dark smoke as Canto 17 begins. But even as he does so, his mind becomes oblivious to the outside world and glimpses three more visions, this time the examples of wrath punished. The first of these is the classical figure of Procne, who, enraged when her husband raped her sister, killed their son and fed him to his father—after which she was transformed into a nightingale. In the second vision the pilgrim sees the crucified figure of Haman, the Persian minister who attempted to persuade King Ahasuerus to condemn to death all the Jews in the kingdom. Finally Dante sees an example from Virgil’s Aeneid: Queen Amata, who wanted Turnus to kill Aeneas and marry her daughter and who ultimately committed suicide when she heard a mistaken report that Turnus had been killed in battle. Dante is drawn out of his trance by the bright light of the Angel of Peace, who shows the pilgrims the way to ascend to the next level. Virgil urges Dante to move quickly, since the sun is setting and the pilgrims cannot travel on the mountain at night. As they begin their ascent, Dante feels the angel’s wing erase another mark from his forehead and hears the words of the beatitude “Blessed are the peacemakers.” While Dante climbs and night begins to descend, the pilgrim feels his strength slip away, until he is immobilized by exhaustion as

Purgatorio he reaches the fourth terrace. He turns to Virgil to ask what sin is purged on this level, and his guide responds that this is the terrace of sloth. Since the poets are delayed on this ledge, Virgil decides to expand his explanation of this terrace by giving Dante a detailed lecture on the nature of love and the human will. Love may be natural or intellectual, Virgil says, and while natural love can never err, intellectual love may choose an evil goal or may pursue a good goal with too much (or too little) enthusiasm. Loving evil may consist of desiring one’s neighbor’s fall from power or loss of goods, or wishing to do harm to one’s neighbor (these result in the sins of pride, envy, and wrath). One may love the good, however, without much zeal (in which case the soul is purged on this terrace of sloth), or one may pursue transient goods with too much passion (resulting in the sins purged on the three terraces above this one). Commentary Canto 10 opens with a difficult line, as Dante passes through the gate that is “forever closed to souls whose loves are bad” (l. 2). In Dante’s view all human actions are motivated by love. Evil deeds arise from a love that is defective or perverted, while virtuous deeds are motivated by love that is in accord with the divine love that holds all the universe in harmony. Virgil will discuss this idea at length in Canto 17. However, the whole of Dante’s Purgatory is structured on the idea of reeducating or reforming the will, so that the penitents’ love is redirected to conform to the love of God. In Purgatory this reeducation will take two forms: In a process based on Aristotle, Dante presents the breaking of the old habits of the will through penance, and the institution of new habits through the meditation on and emulation of positive examples. Thus each section or terrace of Purgatory begins with the presentation (in a variety of forms) of examples of virtue in action, the virtue directly opposed to the vice being purged on that terrace (in this case, humility). There are generally three examples, the first of which is always taken from the life of the Virgin Mary. These examples are followed by the description of sinners doing penance for the vice repented (here, the sin of pride), and finally by more examples, this time of

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the dire consequences resulting from this particular sin. Finally a guardian angel for each terrace will, with his wing, erase one of the p’s from the pilgrim’s forehead, and as the pilgrim passes to the next level he will hear chanted one of the beatitudes from Matthew 6.1–11. In Canto 10 the pilgrim sees the three examples of humility carved into the white marble on the side of the cliff. The first of these represents the annunciation by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she has been chosen to bear the Son of God and her humble reaction giving her complete assent to the will of God (Luke 1. 26–38). In the second example King David abandons the trappings of royalty to dance in a spirit of adoration and humility before the Ark of the Covenant, which is being transported to Jerusalem from the house of Abinidab (2 Samuel 6.1–7). This David exemplum also contains two illustrations of pride in contrast with David’s humility: One of these is the figure of Uzzah, who put out his hand to steady the ark and was struck dead—an exemplum of presumption for daring to touch the ark of the Lord with unsanctified hands. The other is David’s wife, Michal, who looks down on the scene with disdain at David’s undignified behavior (for which she was cursed with barrenness)—an exemplum of arrogance and vanity. The final example of humility is taken from the story of the Roman emperor Trajan, wherein the emperor is accosted by a grieving widow as he is about to ride out with his cavalry. In a display of compassionate humility Trajan suspends his cavalry progress in order to ensure that the widow’s grievance is dealt with justly. This anecdote was available to Dante in various versions of the legend of Saint Gregory the Great. According to a popular medieval legend to which Dante alludes in line 75, Pope Gregory was so moved by stories of the pagan Trajan’s charity that he prayed fervently for the emperor to be restored to life in order to accept God’s saving grace. This intercession of Gregory will be referenced again when Dante sees the redeemed Trajan himself in Canto 20 of the Paradiso, in the heaven of the just, where with King David and four other sovereigns (Constantine, William II of Sicily, Hezekiah, and the Trojan

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RIPHEUS) he forms the eye of the imperial eagle (Paradiso 20, ll. 43–48). These carvings form the positive examples intended to help the will turn to appropriate forms of love. But penance is also needed to turn the will away from sin, the inappropriate sort of love. As we see at the end of this canto, the penance for the sin of pride is to be bent over with the weight of a huge stone, which one must carry until the sin is purged. Since such penance bears a striking resemblance to the contrapasso of the Inferno, the narrator reassures his readers that such penance is cleansing and corrective rather than punitive, and that even in the worst case it is not perpetual but ends with judgment day—which will be a day of blessing, since all in Purgatory are saved. The narrator’s final apostrophe is addressed to “haughty Christians” (and therefore probably including, all his readers). You must understand that you are only a worm, he tells the reader—and the prideful, weighted down and bent toward the earth, are learning that lesson. Ultimately, however, God intends the soul to fly to him like a butterfly. In this image—of the worm becoming the butterfly—Dante encapsulates the theme of metamorphosis that is the central action of the Purgatorio: the transformation of sinful human souls into perfected beings worthy of Paradise. The penitents on each terrace of Purgatory say a unison prayer appropriate to the sin being purged on that level. As Canto 11 opens, the souls of the prideful recite a somewhat expanded version of the Lord’s Prayer. Saint Augustine, the chief authority on the Lord’s Prayer throughout the Middle Ages, had cited this prayer specifically as an antidote to pride. In De sermone Domini 2.16 Augustine says that the very phrase “Our Father” implies a brotherhood of all Christians, making it impossible for the rich or powerful to feel any superiority to their fellows. Dante’s version is an amalgam of Matthew 6.9–13 and Luke 11.2–4, but he inserts additions to the original petitions of the prayer that make it even more fitting for souls emulating humility. When they say, “Thy kingdom come,” for example, the penitents add, “We of ourselves cannot / attain to it, no matter how we strive” (ll. 8–9). When they say, “Forgive us our trespasses,” they add, “Look

not upon our undeserving worth” (l. 18). Further it has been shown that in lines 4–6, when Dante adds the lines “hallowed be thy Power, / by Thy creatures as it behooves us all / to render thanks for Thy sweet effluence,” he is in fact quoting the refrain from Saint Francis’s Laudes creaturarum (“Canticle of the Sun”)—and thus alluding to the saint who for the Middle Ages personified humility more than any other. As he will admit later in Canto 13, pride is the sin that most plagues Dante himself. Thus on this terrace (as he will later on the terraces of wrath and lust), the pilgrim clearly participates in the penance: When he listens to the words of Omberto Aldobrandesco, he bends his head low enough to be able to hear Omberto’s words (l. 73), thus adopting the posture of the humbled penitents. Omberto’s final words, revealing that he must stay on this level until God is satisfied, implies that Purgatory is structured in such a way that each soul spends only as much time on a given level as he needs to make satisfaction for the sins of his own life. Therefore some souls, theoretically, would not have to stop at all levels if they had made satisfaction for some sins while they still lived. Thus Dante, for instance, might need to spend time only on the terraces of pride, wrath, and lust. The three examples of pride included in this canto—Omberto, representing pride of birth; Oderisi of Gubbio, representing pride in artistic accomplishment; and Provenzan Salvani, representing pride in political power—are chosen not only because of their appropriateness for this terrace but also because of their resonance with Canto 10 of the Inferno. In that canto Dante and Virgil had just entered the city of Dis, where they encountered the shades of the heretics, including FARINATA DEGLI UBERTI and CAVALCANTE DEI CAVALCANTI. Here Dante and Virgil have just entered Purgatory proper, and at this parallel point in Purgatory Dante includes several thematic echoes of that earlier canto. The haughty Farinata, whose first words to Dante are “And who would your ancestors be?” (Inferno 10, l. 42), prefigures Omberto and Provenzan in his pride of lineage and political power. Like Provenzan, Farinata was one of the chief Ghibelline leaders at Montaperti, but it was

Purgatorio Farinata’s staunch refusal that quelled Provenzan’s plan to raze the city of Florence. And just as Farinata predicts Dante’s exile in the Inferno (10, ll. 80–81), Oderisi, in connection with his allusion to Provenzan’s humble begging in the square of Siena, also predicts that Dante will be humbled by his coming exile (Purgatorio 11, ll. 140–141). Cavalcante provides another connection between Inferno 10 and Purgatorio 11: Cavalcante’s pride in his son Guido’s artistic accomplishments prefigures Oderisi’s pride in his own artistic reputation. Significantly the figure of GUIDO CAVALCANTI is at the center of both passages. In the Inferno Cavalcanti is disappointed to find Dante making the trip through Hell, assuming that if genius were required to make this journey, then Guido ought to be the one making it. Artistic genius is not sufficient, in either canto, to carry the poet to the heights Dante envisions. In the Inferno Dante seems to have surpassed Guido in grace. In the Purgatorio Oderisi speaks of the transitory nature of artistic fame and remarks how, in painting, the fame of Giotto has now supplanted that of Cimabue, just as, in poetry, the reputation of Cavalcanti has obscured that of Guinizelli (one Guido replacing the other). Further, Oderisi adds, one may already be born who will drive both Guidos out of “fame’s nest” (Purgatorio 11, l. 99). Most scholars believe that Dante here refers to himself. Certainly in 1300, the fictional date of the Comedy, Dante’s reputation was not yet the equal of that or the older and better-known Cavalcanti. But by the time these verses were written, with the Inferno already in circulation, Dante’s fame had clearly supplanted Guido’s. It might be argued that such self-praise is directly opposed to the point of this canto—that humility must counter the sin of pride. But Dante’s apparent egoism is appropriate here for two reasons: First, it helps to illustrate Oderisi’s point about the transience of worldly reputation, and therefore it denigrates rather than celebrates the fame that Dante was in fact currently enjoying. Second, it leads into Dante’s revelation of his own weakness for the sin of pride in Canto 13 and underlines the necessity for the purging of that sin that the pilgrim has already demonstrated by his stooping posture earlier in the canto.

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The examples of pride that begin Canto 12 are carved into the stone floor of the terrace, where they can only be seen by the humbled whose heads are bent low with their burdens. Dante describes 13 biblical and classical examples of the disastrous effects of pride, devoting one tercet to each illustration (ll. 25–63). Using a medieval rhetorical trope called anaphora, Dante rhetorically separates these tercets into three groups of four exempla. He begins each of the first four of these tercets with the phrase “I saw” (Vedea in Italian). He then begins the next four tercets with apostrophes to each of the figures represented in those four carvings—“O Niobe,” “O Saul,” “O mad Arachne,” and “O Rehoboam.” He begins the following four tercets with the word Mostrava, meaning “depicted.” Thus the 12 tercets begin with the letters VVVV, OOOO, MMMM. In his 13th stanza, the culminating example of the fall of Troy, the first line begins with Vedea, the second with O, and the third with Mostrava. Clearly Dante intends for the reader to focus his attention on the acrostic VOM, or, since for medieval readers the letters V and U were synonymous, UOM—the Italian word for “man.” The point seems to be that pride, the first of the seven deadly sins and the sin that begets all others (since it was the first sin committed by Lucifer and by Adam), is so pervasive in the human condition that it is virtually synonymous with “man.” The six biblical examples that Dante chooses to include among the exempla of pride were fairly typical for medieval preachers and theologians. As scholars have shown, five of the six are among the first examples of pride given in the Summa de vitiis, a popular Latin handbook of sins composed by the French Dominican William Peraldus in about 1240 (Dante replaces Adam with Nimrod). A close comparison reveals that Dante chose each of his classical examples deliberately to parallel each of his biblical ones. Lucifer is Dante’s first example of pride. He is paired in the following tercet (ll. 28–30) with the giant Briareus—now one of the giants guarding the central well of Hell in Inferno 31. Just as Lucifer rebelled against the power of God himself and was cast into Hell, so Briareus tried to overthrow Jove but was felled with a thunderbolt. In the second

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Arachne, from Canto 12 of the Purgatorio, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

pair of exempla the gods are first shown looking over the carcasses of other unnamed rebel giants— presumably those who stormed Olympus, piling rocks and trees together to scale the fortress of the immortals (ll. 31–33). This scene is paired with the figure of Nimrod (also pictured as a giant in Inferno 31), who was associated with the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.8–9) and thus with the attempt to build a tower to Heaven. The first four examples are thus all concerned with the kind of hubris that challenges the gods. The next set of exempla begins with Niobe, the wife of Amphion, king of Thebes, who foolishly boasted that because of her seven sons and seven daughters she was superior to Latona, who had only two children—Apollo and Diana. After Apollo had slain all her sons and Diana all her daughters, Niobe was turned to stone, but tears

still flowed ceaselessly from her marble eyes. She is paired with Saul, first king of Israel, who was cast from God’s favor for ignoring his command to slay all the Amalekites. Saul fell on his own sword after his defeat by the Philistines on Mount Gilboa, and in his lament for Saul David asked that no dew or rain would ever fall on Gilboa (2 Samuel 1.21). These two figures seem to be paired purely because of the contrasting ends of their stories: The stone Niobe weeps tears, but Mount Gilboa is never moistened by rain or dew. The next classical example is Arachne, who foolishly challenged Minerva to a weaving contest and produced a tapestry that, though faultless, disparaged the gods. In a rage Minerva tore Arachne’s tapestry to shreds, and when the mortal woman hanged herself in shame after Minerva’s wrath, the goddess saved her and changed her into a spider. Arachne’s biblical counterpart is Rehoboam, the last king of the united Israel, who aroused his people’s rancor by refusing to lighten their taxes. The tribes killed Adoram, Rehoboam’s tax collector, and the panicked Rehoboam fled to Jerusalem in his chariot (1 Kings 12.1–18). This is another odd pairing, though both Arachne and Rehoboam persisted in their foolish obsessions and then both tried to escape the consequences when matters turned against them. But there are other relationships among these second four examples: Both Niobe and Arachne foolishly boasted of their prowess in comparison with two immortals; the first and last kings of Israel showed an unwillingness to listen to others that ultimately destroyed their reigns. All four of these exempla feature foolish mortals whose vanity becomes their downfall. Dante’s next two figures were both killed by their own children as a result of their pride: Eripyle was the wife of Amphiarus, one of the Seven against Thebes. Having foreseen his death at Thebes, Amphiarus hid himself, but for the price of a necklace forged by Vulcan, Eripyle betrayed his hiding place to Polynices. His son, Alcmaeon, ultimately avenged his father by killing his own mother. This exemplum is paired with the figure of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, who in 2 Kings 19 attacks Jerusalem and is defeated by the much smaller force of Hezekiah. When Sennacherib returned to Nineveh, he

Purgatorio was killed by his own sons while worshiping his pagan gods (2 Kings 19. 35–37). The last pair of figures are both haughty military figures ultimately defeated and beheaded by women. Cyrus of Persia had contemptuously killed the son of Tomyris, queen of Scythia. But she subsequently defeated him in battle and had him decapitated. Holofernes was general of the army of Nebuchadnezzar, besieging the Jewish city of Bethulia. Judith was able to charm the general and, when he was off guard, behead him and hang his head from the wall of the city, causing his army to flee in panic. This last group of four exempla seems united by the military theme. The 13th and final example of humbled pride is the city of Troy, whose destruction is carved here in the stone walkway of the terrace. Since medieval lore regarded Troy’s fall as the result of the city’s pride, its burning serves as the climax of the series of illustrations. Thus Dante reminds us that sin is not simply individual—there is also such a thing as corporate sin, for which entire civilizations might be brought low. This is a reminder that becomes more pertinent a bit later in the canto, when Dante ironically refers to Florence as “that so well-governed town” (l. 102). Perhaps the Florentines should remember that towns, too, can be made to suffer for their sins. As the pilgrim leaves the terrace, he hears the words of the first beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5.3): Blessed are the poor in spirit. This specific blessing of the humble is the first of a recurring pattern in the Purgatorio, in which upon leaving each terrace the pilgrim hears the appropriate beatitude—blessing the virtue directly opposed to the sin purged on each level. Though there are generally considered to be eight beatitudes, Dante follows the reasoning of Thomas Aquinas (ST 1.2, q. 69, a. 3 and q. 69, a. 5), who counted seven beatitudes, considering the blessing of those “persecuted for righteousness’ sake” to refer to all seven of the other groups. Further Dante will later divide the beatitude blessing those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness” and use it on two different levels, while omitting altogether the beatitude blessing the meek: The virtue of meekness does not directly contrast any of the seven deadly sins.

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Canto 13 takes the pilgrims to the terrace of the envious. The “livid” or blue-black color of the stone here is the color associated with envy: it is the color of a bruise, and the implication is that the hearts of the envious are continually bruised by the good fortune of other people. For Dante and his contemporaries the sin of envy is more serious than it is usually considered today. More than simply the desire to have some good belonging to someone else, envy implied not merely sorrow at another person’s happiness but joy at someone else’s misfortune. Thus in his “Parson’s Tale” (X, 487) Chaucer, for example, calls envy “the worste synne that is,” directly opposed to the Holy Spirit (X, 484). The Latin term invidia, used for “envy,” encompasses not only what we would call envy but also resentment and hatred. Thomas Aquinas argues that “the most grievous sin is opposed to the greatest virtue,” and, because love or charity is the greatest virtue, hatred (invidia) is directly opposed to it, and hence the greatest sin (ST 1.2, q. 73, a. 4). The etymology of invidia (in indicating the negative, videre from the verb “to see”) lies behind the penance of the envious on this ledge: Their eyes are sewn shut, preventing them from seeing at all. Presumably it was through their sight that they sinned, as they coveted the goods they saw others possess or hated those they saw who possessed those goods. Now blind, they cling together as they stand along the cliff wall, supporting and upholding one another as they failed to do in life. Looking on them, the pilgrim Dante feels pity and compassion—displaying here the virtue of charity that the envious must learn. They wear cloaks of penitential haircloth, all of the same color as the rock, symbolizing their envy by their color but also making them indistinguishable from one another. As in life they sought to distinguish themselves from others by raising themselves above or by bringing others down, now they are without distinction and bound together in their sameness. This explains Sapia’s answer when Dante asks whether anyone in the group is Italian: She minimizes any former distinctions based on nationality or race and emphasizes only that all are citizens of the Holy City of God.

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The penance of blindness explains the auditory form that the exempla of charity take in this round. Only a single phrase is whispered to the pilgrims, who are then left to provide the context of each utterance for themselves. The first of these, from the marriage feast at Cana, illustrates first Mary’s generosity in finding that the wedding party has run out of wine and convincing her son to perform his first miracle out of compassion for the bride and groom. Allegorically, however, this example also suggests Christ’s later Crucifixion. The traditional interpretation of this passage was that the water represented the prophecies of the Old Testament and that the wine symbolized the blood of Christ, through which those prophecies were fulfilled. The second example, which Dante probably knew from Cicero’s De amicitia (“On Friendship”), recalls the story of Orestes and his faithful friend Pylades. The tyrant of Tauris sought to kill Orestes for the murder of Orestes’ own mother, Clytemnestra, but he did not know Orestes on sight. Therefore when captured, Pylades claimed to be Orestes to save his friend from execution. This act of generosity recalls, as well, Christ’s words to the apostles in John 15.13: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” The third example of charity is a statement from Christ himself—the exhortation from the Sermon on the Mount to love their enemies. More completely, the appeal reads, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5.43–44). Thus Jesus calls his listeners to a higher righteousness than was practiced before—a righteousness he demonstrated himself when from the cross he prayed for those who crucified him (Luke 23.34). One must not only love others but must love and pray for even one’s enemies. Until the envious can do this, they cannot advance to the next terrace of the mountain. Thus all three of the examples of charity suggest on another level the ultimate act of love, Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. The Eucharistic imagery of the wine at Cana, the allusion to laying down his life in the Orestes example, and the loving words of Christ himself

in the third passage all serve to emphasize how completely the sin of envy contradicts the love of Christ. In lines 37–42 Dante articulates for the only time in the Purgatorio how closely the means of educating the will in Purgatory resembles the training of an animal. In a canto in which the eyelids of the sinners are sewn together like those of a newly captured hawk being broken for training, Virgil uses the terms whip and curb to describe the examples of charity and envy encountered on this terrace. Like a horse in training, the penitents are spurred on to emulate the examples of charity provided here as the “whip.” Later they are restrained by the bridle (or “curb”) of envy in the form of exempla of envy punished. So in each terrace the sinners will be urged (“whipped”) to perform acts of virtue and deterred (“curbed”) from committing acts of sin. As on the terrace of pride the souls of the envious chant a prayer appropriate for their circle. Here (ll. 49–51) the brief prayers Dante hears appealing to the Virgin Mary, Saint Michael, Saint Peter, and all the saints are a part of the Litany of the Saints, most notably recited after the baptisms that occurred during the Easter vigil. Thus the envious invoke the aid of those who were without envy. But most important they ask that the saints pray “for us” (l. 50), a communal prayer rather than a request for any individual. Also as on the previous terrace Dante brings the abstract sin of envy to life by providing a near-contemporary embodiment of the sin in Sapia of Siena. Her close relationship to Provenzan Salvani, whom Dante saw on the ledge of pride, implies the close relationship between the sins of pride and envy— one sin begets the other. Dante’s revelation that he anticipates having to spend a good deal of time on the terrace of pride but not much here on the ledge of envy is therefore an incredibly complex statement: The poet Dante reveals a kind of humility by recognizing that he is most guilty of the sin of pride. But by failing to recognize that envy and pride are closely entwined, the pilgrim Dante reveals that he still possesses a kind of pride, imagining himself to be above envious thoughts. When Dante introduces himself to Guido del Duca in Canto 14, he modestly declines to men-

Purgatorio tion his name, saying that he has as yet achieved no fame in the world, so that his name will mean nothing to Guido. Such humility from the pilgrim seems out of character, but it may be that, as he admitted to Sapia of Siena in the previous canto, he has come to realize that pride is his most characteristic sin and that he has here taken the lesson of the previous terrace to heart. His mention of the River Arno as his home, however, sparks a long diatribe from Guido concerning the bestial nature of the inhabitants on the banks of that river. Before looking at Guido’s unflattering characterizations of the Tuscan cities, it is useful to point out the way in which the discussion of the Arno in the Purgatorio’s 14th canto parallels Virgil’s description of the Old Man of Crete in Canto 14 of the Inferno: All the rivers of Hell had their source in the tears of the Old Man of Crete (see Durling’s edition of the poem, p. 240). As that statue represents the steady decay of human civilization since the Golden Age, so the theme of Guido’s lament—for both Tuscany and Romagna—is the degeneracy of those realms compared with the nobler past. And as the fissure in the statue represents human sin, so that the tears that flow from the fissure form the rivers of Hell, so the Arno flows through a land of moral degeneracy whose inhabitants (as Dante has demonstrated in his Inferno) seem largely destined to spend eternity along those infernal rivers. Like ULYSSES’ men, turned to swine by the sorcery of Circe, all the natives of Tuscany seem to have been turned to beasts. Specifically Casentino is said to be peopled by swine, Arezzo by curs, Florence by wolves, and Pisa by foxes. In this description it seems likely that Dante had in mind a passage from BOETHIUS’s Consolation of Philosophy (Bk. 4, prose 3), wherein Lady Philosophy argues that without goodness human beings lose their humanity: The man who “burns with greed is like a wolf,” she says; while a “wild and restless man who is for ever exercising his tongue” is like “a dog yapping”; one who lies in ambush to entrap another is like a fox; and “a man wallowing in foul and impure lusts is occupied by the filthy pleasures of a sow” (125). Thus Guido suggests that the Pisans are particularly fraudulent, the Florentines avaricious, and so on (see Hollander’s edition, p. 311).

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Guido’s mention of Rinieri’s notorious grandson, Fulcieri da Calboli, serves in part as a transition into Guido’s second lament, this time for his and Rinieri’s native Romagna. It also acts as another prophecy for Dante himself about his native Florence. In the time frame of the narrative it will be two years before Fulcieri becomes podestà of Florence. Fulcieri, brought in by the Black Guelphs who by 1302 controlled the city and engineered Dante’s banishment, was in theory supposed to be an impartial magistrate. Yet his tenure was marked by cruel arrests of leading White Guelphs, as well as the few remaining Ghibelline leaders in Florence, some of whom he tortured to death, some of whom he beheaded, some of whom he sold to the Blacks to be executed. Guido refers to Florence as a “wretched woods” (l. 64) that cannot regenerate itself in 1,000 years. This recalls the Wood of Suicides in Canto 13 of the Inferno, and the unnamed Florentine suicide that seemed a symbol of the city’s destroying itself. (Why Rinieri is not privy to the same foresight as Guido is puzzling: Since Guido claims the knowledge has come to him in a flash of “inspiration” [l. 37], it may be that Dante imagines the foreknowledge of immortal souls as given to them in moments of insight rather than as available to them consistently.) Just as the despotic Fulcieri represents a falling off from his noble grandfather, Rinieri, so the citizens of contemporary Romagna are, in general, poor specimens compared with their noble forebears. Romagna (the area of Italy bordered by the River Po in the north, the Adriatic in the east, the Apennine hills in the south, and the River Reno to the west) has declined so significantly, in Guido’s view, that he finally ends by simply weeping for his homeland—but not before he has lamented its decline for some nine tercets. In the traditional melancholy language of the ubi sunt theme (“Where are they?”) that recalls Sordello’s discourse on the decline of the European monarchy in the Valley of the Princes (in Canto 7), Guido names 10 particular men, three cities, and four families of Romagna, whose descendants or current inhabitants have decayed in recent times. Those named were all leaders renowned for chivalric virtues during the last quarter of the 12th century or the first three-quarters of the 13th. Essentially Dante very deliberately pairs Guelphs

128 Purgatorio with Ghibellines, as he has with Guido del Duca and Rinieri da Calboli. Mainardi and Lizio (l. 37) are Arrigo Mainardi, an ally of Guido’s against the Guelphs, and Lizio da Valbona, who joined Rinieri against the Ghibellines. Pier Traversaro and Guido di Carpigna (l. 38) are, respectively, the Ghibelline lord of Ravenna whom Guido (and Mainardi) supported, and a later Guelph podestà of the same city. Such pairings of Guelph and Ghibelline continue in Guido’s lament, implying that the envy underlying the bitter internecine feuds between the two parties is now meaningless, and that the virtue of these former leaders transcends party lines. Canto 14 ends with two examples of envy punished, presented (as were the examples of charity) as disembodied voices, this time like thunderclaps. The first voice is that of Cain, who killed his brother, Abel, out of envy because God seemed to prefer Abel’s offering over his own. The second voice is that of the princess Aglauros. Her story, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2.737–832), is as follows: The god Mercury had fallen in love with Aglauros’s sister, Herse, and approached Aglauros to arrange a tryst with Herse. Aglauros at first agreed, but when Mercury arrived to lie with Herse, Aglauros, out of envy that her sister should become the god’s lover, refused to let Mercury in. The god retaliated by turning Aglauros to stone. Two significant points are suggested by these two examples. First in both stories it is envy of divine favor shown to another that receives punishment. Envy, it seems, is not simply the coveting of another’s possessions but is, as invidia, a hatred that directly opposes the will of God. As Aquinas says, “Charity is not any kind of love, but the love of God: hence not any kind of hatred is opposed to it directly, but the hatred of God, which is the most grievous of all sins” (ST 1.2, q. 73, a. 4). Second the examples of envy both involve the act of invidia directed against a sibling, one closest in blood to the sinner. In the context of this canto it is clear that Dante considers the violent civil wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines, Whites and Blacks, in Tuscany and Romagna to be the result of precisely this kind of sin: It is envy that causes all of this strife in Italy, and it is charity that must amend it.

Virgil explains that these voices are the “curb” of envy, returning to the imagery of training animals used earlier in Canto 13, where the exempla of charity are referred to as the “whip” of envy. It seems clear that this imagery applies, as well, to the long discourses of Guido da Duca that make up most of the canto. Far from being a digression on Italian politics, Guido’s dual laments parallel the classical and biblical examples of envy and charity. Guido provides a contemporary Italian “whip” of envy by citing the 10 noble leaders of Romagna and a contemporary “curb” in delineating the bestial inhabitants of the cities of Tuscany. The two very esoteric passages that open Canto 15—the six lines Dante uses to say that it is 3:00 P.M. (ll. 1–6) and the nine-line description he gives of a reflected ray of light—have puzzled and sometimes tried the patience of readers who would simply like to get on with the story. Some commentators have suggested that the poet is simply being playful here. But there seems to be more to these passages. The canto in general is filled with images of light and the reflection of light; thus it contrasts starkly with Canto 16, in which all is shrouded by the dark smoke that represents the sin of wrath. In the first six lines the poet implies that it is 3:00 P.M. in Purgatory, and therefore 3:00 A.M. in Jerusalem, directly antipodal to Purgatory. Since Italy is by Dante’s reckoning 45 degrees west of Jerusalem, it is midnight in the place where he now writes this canto. The light and angle of the sun are, of course, the ultimate subject of these lines, but they also introduce the idea of the evening as a mirror image of the morning as the sun’s angle in the afternoon reflects its position before noon. That reflecting image continues in the next few tercets: As the poets walk westward into the setting sun, Dante mistakenly believes he is blinded by the sun’s reflection off the surface before him at an angle that flashes the light into his eyes. In fact, he is looking at the brightness of the approaching angel of charity. The light that the angel radiates is, in a sense, the reflected light of God’s love— though more technically the angel receives and gives off divine light according to his own capacity to love, as Virgil suggests later in the canto when he explains that “the greater the proportion of our

Purgatorio love, / the more eternal goodness we receive” (ll. 71–72). Thus the imagery of light and reflection carries over into Dante’s question to Virgil about the nature of envy as Guido del Duca had expressed it. Virgil answers this question first by asserting that the treasures of this world, because they are finite, cannot be shared equally to the satisfaction of all. Whatever one person owns reduces what can be possessed by another, and therefore the desire for temporal goods breeds envy over whatever is possessed by anyone else. Virgil then contrasts this state of affairs with the situation of heavenly treasure: Virtue and the love of God are riches that only grow greater when they are shared. In another metaphor involving light and mirrors Virgil declares that each heavenly soul is like a mirror reflecting the light of God’s love—the more mirrors, the more light is given off, and the initial source of the light is itself never diminished by the sharing. Commentators over the years have pointed out probable sources for these sentiments in Dante, including Saint Augustine, who in The City of God (15.5) asserts that goodness is the one thing that is not diminished when it is shared, and Saint Gregory the Great, who in his Moralia in Job (6.46.86) advises that the way to be free of envy is to embrace our heavenly heritage, which is not lessened no matter how many souls inherit it. As the poets finish their climb, made easier for Dante as another letter p is removed from his brow and the weight of sin he must carry is reduced, they stand on the ledge of wrath. The examples (the “whip” of wrath) are revealed to Dante in this round by an ecstatic vision—one that he experiences but Virgil does not, presumably because the vision is only granted to the saved. Some commentators refer to these visions as examples of meekness, but in fact the beatitude that will be sung at the end of this terrace is “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Canto 17, ll. 68–69). The specific virtue directly opposed to wrath is a kind of patient gentleness that promotes peace, as the beatitude suggests. The first example, taken as always from the life of the Virgin, shows the pilgrim a scene at the temple in Jerusalem with Mary finding the

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young Jesus disputing among the scholars in the temple. The incident (related in Luke 2.41–48) took place at Passover, when Mary and Joseph had taken the youth Jesus to Jerusalem and, after starting back home and finding that he was not among their party, searched frantically for him throughout the city for three days. Despite her obvious anxiety Mary’s tone is not irate or accusatory but rather gentle and without anger. The second positive example, drawn again from classical sources, reveals the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus (560–527 B.C.E.) in conversation with his angry wife. When an overeager suitor for their daughter’s hand publicly embraced the girl without having obtained her parents’ approval, Pisistratus’s wife demanded that Pisistratus have the young man executed. Pisistratus is supposed to have replied, “If we kill those who love us, what will we do to those who hate us?” This reputedly defused his wife’s wrath. The third and most extreme example of gentleness as the antithesis of anger is the scene of the stoning of Saint Stephen. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was accused of blasphemy by the Jewish authorities and stoned to death, praying for the souls of his killers even as he was dying (Acts 7.54– 59). While the first two acts of peacemaking are fairly commonplace, the extraordinary mercy and selfless love demonstrated by Stephen as he forgives his murderers are beyond any normal expectations, and so is a particularly lofty example toward which the wrathful penitent might aspire. When the pilgrim has seen this final vision, Virgil urges him to waken and move ahead. Virgil, who has not seen the vision, tells the pilgrim that he can read his mind, but readers have generally been unsure as to just what Virgil means by this. Certainly he is aware that Dante is experiencing something, and he knows that their experience on each terrace has begun with positive examples of one of the virtues. That much he knows and thus reads the situation, if not specifically reading Dante’s mind. He urges the pilgrim on as they walk now into the setting sun, and a cloud of black smoke moves toward them. This cloud, the visual symbol of wrath, will surround the poets throughout Canto 16.

130    Purgatorio Canto 16 of the Purgatorio is the 50th canto in the Comedy. This Canto and the next mark the midway point of the journey, and Dante takes the opportunity to reinforce some of the major political and theological themes of the poem, such as the degeneracy of human society, the primacy of human free will, the corruption of the papacy, and the need for a strong secular ruler in Europe. The burning smoke that shrouds the chapter is a fairly obvious symbol of the sin of wrath, both because it is hot and because it blinds the eyes as wrath may blind one’s mind to reason. Here Virgil, apparently in his role as human reason, is able to lead the pilgrim through the smoke—an allegory of the soul’s relying on reason to overcome blind rage. On this terrace the penitents chant the Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”), a prayer included in the litany of the Mass since the seventh century. The

Marco the Lombard, from Canto 16 of the Purgatorio, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

prayer twice repeats the line “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us,” and ends with the line “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, give us peace.” The focus on the gentle lamb and the petition for peace make the prayer perfectly appropriate for the souls purging themselves of wrath. Most of Canto 16 is devoted to the lengthy discourse of Marco Lombardo. Marco’s aside about the corrupt state of society (ll. 47–48) leads to the pilgrim’s question about whether the stars are responsible for the evil that people do. Marco’s answer, which runs to some 66 lines, follows the pattern of Scholastic discourse (as Durling points out in his edition, 269): He first refutes the argument Dante has suggested and then proves his own position. The stars—which can be read, from a modern perspective, to imply any kind of natural forces (genetics, for example) that might act to determine human behavior—can undeniably exert an influence on the inclinations of people. The intellect, however, is created directly by God (this was the medieval notion stemming ultimately from Aristotle). Thus the intellect is not subject to the influence of the stars; nor is the human will, which is an aspect of the intellect. The human will is therefore free, and human beings are responsible for their actions, good or ill. If this were not so, then there would be no justice in divine reward or punishment. What, then, is the source of society’s corruption? Not human nature, Marco implies. In an image directly opposed to the traditional Augustinian Christian view of human nature corrupted by original sin, Marco (and presumably Dante, speaking through him) asserts that children are born with a natural inclination toward the good (an important theme that receives more detailed treatment in the next canto). They love all of the good things of creation indiscriminately and therefore need the guidance of law to direct their wills appropriately, first toward God as the highest good and then to more trivial goods according to their merit. Dante had developed this idea earlier, in Convivio 4 and in De monarchia 3.14–15, where he had stressed that the law would have been unnecessary had man remained in Paradise, but that our original inno-

Purgatorio cence had been weakened by original sin, so that the human will needed guidance. The cause of society’s current degenerate state, Marco asserts (reiterating what Dante had written in both the Convivio and De monarchia), is the involvement of the pope in secular politics. Dante uses the image of two suns (l. 107) to suggest the equal authority of pope and emperor—in doing so he rejects contemporary Guelph rhetoric that pictured the pope as the Sun and the emperor as the Moon, which shone with reflected and hence subordinate light. The problem, Marco says, is that one “sun” has extinguished the light of the other (l. 109), as the pope has quashed the power of the emperor. Of the current pontiff (who, in 1300, would have been Dante’s old enemy Boniface VIII), Marco says he “can chew the cud but lacks the cloven hoof” (l. 98). This curious image is based on the dietary laws in Leviticus 11.3, where the Israelites are permitted to eat animals with hooves, so long as the foot is cloven and the animal chews the cud. Such dietary laws were, of course, meaningless to medieval Christians, and so biblical commentators interpreted such passages allegorically—in this particular case, as a description of a just man or to the Christian clergy: “Chewing the cud” was seen as symbolizing spiritual meditation, while the cloven foot implied the ability to judge and to make distinctions. The current pope Boniface, therefore, Marco seems to picture as one who is learned and meditates on the Scriptures but who does not properly distinguish between good and evil. Marco finally turns from philosophical discourse to more concrete historical applications, pinpointing the reign of the Emperor Frederick II (1220– 50) as the point of corruption of the divinely ordained relationship between pope and emperor. Frederick experienced increasingly degenerating relationships with a series of popes beginning in the late 1220s, often resulting in war. But Marco names three old men—Lombard nobles he had been familiar with during his life who still upheld the old ideals of virtue. One of these is Currado da Palazzo, podestà of Piecenza in 1288, who, according to an unsubstantiated legend, went into battle bearing his army’s standard and, despite losing both hands in the battle, continued to hold up

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the banner with his bloody stumps until he ultimately succumbed to his wounds. The other two are Guido da Castel and Gherardo da Camino of Treviso, both of whom Dante had already praised as models of nobility in the Convivio and both of whom, in all likelihood, had given Dante refuge during his long exile. Ironically all three of these virtuous old men were Guelphs—the party supporting the pope’s secular power. The three examples of wrath and its consequences in Canto 17 include one biblical and two classical cases. Scholars have seen them as illustrating three categories of wrath: against kin, against neighbor, and against God. The first example presents the story of Procne, Tereus, and Philomela (already alluded to as one of the exempla in Canto 9). Violence begets violence in this story, in which Procne plots vengeance on her husband, Tereus, for his rape and mutilation of her sister—a vengeance that involves her slaying her own child and feeding the boy to his father. The story presents the horrifying consequences of wrath against one’s own family. The second example depicts the story of Haman and Mordecai from the book of Esther. Angered at the Jew Mordecai’s failure to bow to him, Haman persuades King Ahasuerus to issue a decree calling for the execution of all the Jews in Persia. But Mordecai’s niece is Esther, the favorite consort of the king, and when she intercedes, the Jews are spared and Haman himself is executed on the very gallows he had prepared for Mordecai. Thus wrath against one’s neighbors has deadly consequences. Finally Dante uses an example drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid. Queen Amata, wife of King Latinus of Latium, is enraged at the thought of her daughter Lavinia’s marrying the foreign invader Aeneas rather than her own choice, the native Turnus. In Book 12 of the Aeneid (ll. 595ff.) Amata mistakenly believes that Turnus has died in battle and takes her own life. From Dante’s point of view Aeneas’s marriage to Lavinia was a part of the divinely ordained founding of the Roman Empire, from which the Christian Church would spring. Thus Amata’s rage at this destiny illustrates wrath directed at God himself, and her death suggests the consequences of such wrath.

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After leaving the terrace of wrath for the fourth ledge, Dante experiences a great heaviness and is all but paralyzed by exhaustion. In part Dante is participating in the sin of sloth, purged on this level. And since as we have already seen the pilgrims cannot move up the mountain during the night, it would be easy for them to rest here. But the pilgrim demonstrates the kind of zeal that the penitents on this level should be learning when he asks Virgil to explain the nature of this particular terrace—a request that ultimately sparks Virgil’s long discourse on the nature of sin. Virgil’s speech, at 53 lines one of the longest in the Purgatorio, focuses on love as the motivating force behind all human actions, good or bad. As such it is a speech of central importance to the Comedy as a whole, and appropriately it is placed here, in the central canto of the central canticle of the poem. The doctrine, as Virgil explains it, is drawn chiefly from various sections of the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, though it owes something to Saint Augustine, Boethius, and Christian Neoplatonist philosophers as well. Every creature in the universe, Virgil explains, is moved by love. But love can be of two kinds. The first is natural love, a love divinely instilled in all created things that naturally inclines them to desire their own perfection, which generally means desiring their proper position in God’s orderly cosmos. For human beings and for angels this natural love is what inspires them to desire the highest good, which is God himself. If natural love were the only motivation for human actions, sin would not exist, since this kind of love never errs. But in creatures with free will (i.e., humans and angels) there is another kind of love, a mental kind that involves free choice. This elective kind of love can err, Virgil says, and this is the cause of sin. Errant love can fall into three categories: It may be misdirected toward the wrong goals; it may pursue the good with too little zeal; or it may pursue secondary goods with excessive enthusiasm. These three categories form the basis of the structure of Purgatory (as the threefold pattern of sins of the lion, leopard, and she-wolf provided the scheme for the Inferno’s structure).

Misplaced love, a love directed at the wrong object, is chiefly a perverted sort of self-love: It might include the kind of pride that glories in elevation above the status of others, or envy that resents the elevation of others, or wrath that seeks to harm others because of such resentment. Thus the first type of defective love is punished on the first three terraces. As Virgil had made clear at the beginning of his discourse, this fourth terrace punishes sloth, the sin caused by the second type of defective love, a love of the good that lacks vigor or passion. The good implied here is the highest good, God himself; thus sloth is insufficient zeal for the offered love of God. In Dante’s day it was considered a sin to which members of the clergy were particularly susceptible. The third category of defective love, the pursuit of secondary goods with inappropriate zest, results in the sins purged on the three terraces above this one. While Virgil does not specify, preferring that Dante learn about these sins as he reaches those levels, Dante’s readers would certainly know that the last three terraces would be devoted to the sins of avarice, gluttony, and lust. The earthly pleasures of riches, food, and physical love are part of God’s bounty to humans, but to love them excessively was to forsake God himself in favor of his gifts.

MIDDLE PURGATORY— LOVE DEFECTIVE (CANTO 18) Synopsis Virgil has ceased speaking as Canto 18 begins, but Dante is eager for more knowledge. He asks his guide to define love. Virgil begins by reiterating Marco Lombardo’s description of the newborn soul from Canto 16: The child’s mind will incline toward anything that gives it pleasure, and such an inclination is love. Dante asks how, if the source of love is outside the human being, a person can be praised or blamed for such love. Virgil answers that desire itself is neither good nor bad. But human reason has the power of judgment and distinction, and through free will man has the power to resist those desires that are evil. Virgil admits, however, that he can only explain as much as human reason can discern. Beatrice, he says, will be able to explain more when Dante meets her.

Purgatorio It is now near midnight, and Dante’s thoughts begin to wander sleepily when suddenly a large group of souls comes running around the side of the mountain, spurred on by a zealous desire for the good. Two spirits leading the group shout out the exempla of zeal. The first recalls the Virgin Mary hastening to the hills to visit Elizabeth and give her the news of Christ’s incarnation. The second alludes to Julius Caesar, who, en route to Ilerda in Spain, stopped on the way to besiege Marseilles but left part of his army there and hastened on to complete his original objective. The penitents, as they follow, shout out words of encouragement to spur on one another. As the souls rush past, Virgil asks where the passage to the next level may be found, but none of the shades can stop to answer. The abbot of San Zeno takes the time to call out as he rushes by, telling Virgil to follow the group and he will find the path. The abbot also takes the opportunity to cry out a brief prophecy against Alberto della Scala, lord of Verona, who has appointed an inappropriate abbot to the speaker’s old post at San Zeno. As the abbot leaves the poets far behind, Virgil tells Dante to turn around and observe the two souls at the end of the large group of penitents: These are shouting out the negative examples for this terrace—illustrations of sloth and its consequences. The first holds up the stubborn Israelites wandering with Moses in the desert, who were punished for their recalcitrance when they were prevented from crossing the Jordan River into the promised land. The second example recalls the companions of Aeneas, who settled in Sicily rather than moving on with Aeneas into Latium, and so missed out on the founding of Rome. As the canto ends, the pilgrim’s head is spinning with what he has just witnessed, and he is drifting into sleep, where his thoughts begin to form themselves into dreams. Commentary Readers may find it odd that as Canto 18 opens, following Virgil’s lengthy lecture on love, the pilgrim still wants more information, asking his guide for a definition of love. But for the third consecutive canto here at the center of the Comedy Dante deals with central theological and philosophical issues. In terms borrowed directly from Scholastic

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philosophy and reminiscent of stilnovist poetry, particularly Guido Cavalcanti’s great canzone “Donna me prega” (“A Lady Asks Me”), Virgil discusses the psychology of love. Scholastic psychology was based on Aristotle’s De anima (“On the Soul”) as interpreted in the 12th and 13th centuries by the Muslim Averröes and Christian philosophers such as Albertus Magnus and, most immediately for Dante, Thomas Aquinas. Virgil begins by returning to Marco Lombardo’s picture of the soul that enters the world with a natural potential for loving. That potential becomes actual when it focuses on a particular object of desire. In Aristotelian psychology the object of desire is an image (what Aquinas calls the “intelligible form” and Dante here calls an “intention”) abstracted from the individual object or person (ll. 22–24). When the soul contemplates this image and receives pleasure from it, this is the first stage of love (ll. 25–27). The soul is thus drawn to the object of its desire, as fire is drawn naturally upward toward the sphere of fire according to medieval science (ll. 28–22). As Virgil has described love, it seems inevitable that the soul must love what attracts it, and Dante’s questioning of how blame can be attached to such desire is perfectly justified. Over the next 30 lines Virgil discusses the role of reason in the process he has just described. Sometime before the soul begins to move toward the object of desire, reason may step in to control the motions of the will. This is the consensual love of the mind Virgil had discussed in the previous canto. Just as Marco Lombardo had asserted that human free will could control any forces that may exert influence upon people from without, so here Virgil affirms the ability of that same free will to resist and control impulses from within. Sin, like virtue, may be motivated by love in these central cantos of the Comedy, but under no circumstances is human responsibility mitigated by any irresistible force. Free will means that people are always responsible for their actions—for the sins that consign them to Purgatory as well as for the will to purge those sins on these terraces. Sloth (or acedia) is the sin expiated on this level, and the penitents here run ceaselessly as a demonstration of the virtue of zeal. But unlike the souls

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on the other terraces, these sinners recite no unison prayer. Perhaps Dante saw the immobility of prayer as an easy opportunity to slip into sloth, a sin associated particularly with the clergy in the Middle Ages. Since medieval acedia was conceived chiefly as the neglect of religious duties, and might be illustrated by a lazy monk or parish priest (as it is in passus 5 of Piers Plowman), these souls are not allowed to put aside their zealous penitence to take the chance of falling asleep over their prayers. It is no coincidence that the one soul who speaks to the pilgrims on this level is himself a monk— the abbot of San Zeno. This abbot has not been absolutely identified, although because he mentions the “good Emperor” Frederick Barbarossa’s zealous destruction of the rebellious city of Milan approvingly, it is assumed that he is Gherardo II (d. 1187), the abbot of Verona’s San Zeno abbey during Frederick’s reign. Frederick’s actions are apparently meant to contrast the abuse of power demonstrated by the lord of Verona, Alberto della Scala (father of Dante’s great patron CAN GRANDE DELLA SCALA). The abbot’s prophecy concerning Alberto—that he will soon have reason to rue his actions (Alberto died in 1301)—refers to Alberto’s appointment of his illegitimate son, Guiseppe, to the abbot’s own former post at San Zeno in 1292. In violation of church law Guiseppe was appointed despite his illegitimacy, his physical deformity, and his mental incompetence. Any one of these defects would have been cause to deny Guiseppe the office without special dispensation, and the latter two almost guaranteed the nonperformance of the abbot’s spiritual duties—making Guiseppe guilty of acedia, a fact that explains the inclusion of this odd detail in this canto. The examples of zeal that the penitents shout out begin, again, with the Virgin Mary. The words allude to Mary’s visitation of her cousin Elizabeth in Luke 1.39–56: Informed by the angel Gabriel of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Mary rushes immediately into the hill country where Elizabeth lives with Zachariah. The penitents emulate her spiritual zeal to visit her cousin and share with her the good news of the annunciation—at which the child in Elizabeth’s womb (the future John the Baptist) leapt for joy. The second example illustrating secu-

lar zeal, recalls the turning point in the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey. En route to the Spanish city of Ilerda (modern day Lerida) in 48–49 B.C.E., Caesar stopped to lay siege to Massilia (now Marseilles), which had allied itself with Pompey. But refusing to be deterred from his main objective, Caesar left a part of his army there under Brutus and zealously pushed on to northern Spain by forced marches to encounter the main part of Pompey’s army. Within 40 days Caesar had subdued the whole western part of the empire under his authority. The examples of sloth called out by the last of the penitents to race by are also taken from both biblical and classical sources. The first recalls the reluctance of the Israelites to follow the spiritual lead of Moses after their escape from bondage in Egypt through the Red Sea. Because of their lack of zeal in pursuit of the good—of the Promised Land—God delayed their crossing of the Jordan for 40 years, until all those who had failed in their diligence had died. Only Joshua and Caleb, and the children born in the wilderness, were allowed to cross over into the land of Canaan (Numbers 14.20–33). The second example presents a closely parallel tradition from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which a group of Aeneas’s companions refuses to follow him to Latium, preferring instead to stop and settle in Sicily (Aeneid 5.605– 640). Aeneas allows them to stay, but as a result of their lack of zeal for their promised end, they miss out on the glory of founding the Roman Empire.

UPPER PURGATORY—LOVE MISDIRECTED (CANTOS 19–27) Synopsis When Canto 19 opens, it is close to dawn, and the pilgrim dreams of a hideous, deformed woman who, as Dante stares at her, gradually transforms into a beautiful lady who entices him with an irresistibly delightful song. She is a Siren, she says, but as she sings, a heavenly lady appears by her side. The saintly woman calls to Virgil, who moves toward the Siren and tears off her garment, exposing her belly and loins. Such a stench arises from those hidden parts that Dante awakens from his dream, only to find the real Virgil chiding him as, for the third time, he tries to rouse the pilgrim from slumber.

Purgatorio Dante rises and, burdened with his thoughts, follows Virgil to the passageway to the fifth terrace, where the angel of zeal shows them the way up, pronounces the beatitude “Blessed are they that mourn,” and brushes Dante’s forehead with his wing, erasing another letter p from his brow. As they climb, Virgil asks the pilgrim what is troubling him, and Dante responds that he cannot get his dream out of his mind. Virgil tells him that the figure in the dream was the sorceress who plagues those on the terraces above, and he urges Dante to make haste. The pilgrim climbs as quickly as he can and emerges on the next ledge, where numerous spirits lie facedown in the dirt. The spirits are chanting verse 25 from Psalm 119, “My soul clings to the dust.” Virgil asks for the passage up, and one of the souls answers that if the poets are exempt from the penance of this ledge, they should go toward the right to find the quickest passage up. Dante moves toward the supine spirit who spoke and asks who he is and why he is here. The spirit identifies himself as POPE ADRIAN V, a pontiff who reigned only 38 days. He reveals how he was beguiled by avarice in life and describes the penance of the greedy as a kind of contrapasso: As in life they would not raise their eyes from the things of the earth toward Heaven, so on the mountain they are forced to look only into the dust, with their hands and feet tied, holding them motionless until God gives them leave to move. When the pilgrim learns he is speaking to a former pope, he kneels in reverence, but Pope Adrian chastises him for doing so. Alluding to a passage from the gospels, Adrian asserts that the souls on this mountain are all equal in being servants only of God himself. He sends the pilgrim off to continue his journey, first expressing a wish that his niece, Alagia, still alive on earth, may not be led astray by the example of Adrian’s family. At the pope’s request the pilgrim leaves Adrian to his penance and as Canto 20 opens begins to make his way around the bodies lying prone in the dust. Dante, recalling the beginning of the Comedy, lets out an angry apostrophe to the shewolf of incontinence and asks how long the world must wait for the one who will make the beast flee

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(the greyhound of Inferno 1, l. 101). As the poets move along the ledge, they hear one soul crying out the examples that oppose the sin of greed: He speaks first of Mary, who because of her poverty gave birth in a stable. Then he mentions Fabricus, a consul of Rome who refused to accept bribes and as a result died a pauper. Finally the soul speaks of Saint Nicholas, who out of generosity provided dowries for three poor girls to prevent their forced prostitution. Dante asks the speaker who he is and why he is the one calling out these examples. The penitent identifies himself as HUGH CAPET, founder of the Capetian line of kings who have ruled France since the late 10th century. Hugh proceeds to condemn his long line of descendants for their unbridled greed and violence. He traces this first to the seizure of Provence by Louis IX and his brother, Charles of Anjou, who had married the daughters of Count Raymond Berenger of Provence and therefore claimed the territory as their wives’ dowry. Hugh then goes on to condemn the French monarchy’s annexation of Normandy, Ponthieu, and Gascony, as well as Charles of Anjou’s invasion of Italy and his claiming of the throne of Sicily—all done, Hugh repeats ironically three times, to “make amends” for the initial sin. Hugh goes on to prophesy (from the vantage point of the fictional Easter 1300 date) the coming misdeeds of the Capetian monarchy. These include Charles of Valois’s invasion and “pacification” of Florence at the invitation of Pope Boniface, which resulted in Dante’s permanent exile, and Charles II of Naples’s selling his youngest daughter into marriage (for a large amount of money) to the elderly Azzo VIII of Este. But the worst act of his descendants, Hugh foresees, will be Philip IV’s violation of Pope Boniface’s palace at Anagni and imprisonment of the pope (1303), followed by Philip’s destruction and plundering of the Knights Templars. When, Hugh asks, will God show his vengeance on his evil line? Hugh then goes on to answer Dante’s second question: The words he called out were the prayers that each soul on this level is required to pray repeatedly each day—it was merely coincidence that only he was praying aloud at the moment the

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poets heard him. Hugh adds that during the hours of the night the penitents must recite a different prayer, enumerating examples of the sin of avarice. Hugh mentions seven examples, the most on any level of Purgatory after pride: Pygmalion, Midas, Achan, Ananias (and his wife, Sapphira), Heliodorus, Polymnestor, and Crassus. The pilgrims move on along the terrace when suddenly the entire mountain shakes, filling the pilgrim with fear. This is followed by a shout of Gloria in excelsis Deo (“Glory to God in the highest”). Puzzled, the pilgrim continues to move along the ledge, trying to understand what has happened. As Dante and Virgil proceed through the circle of the avaricious, the pilgrim continues to wonder about the events that closed Canto 20, when suddenly a shade approaches them from behind. Dante compares the meeting to Christ’s appearance to the two travelers on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24.13–16). The new figure greets them, and Virgil wishes him God’s blessing, explaining that he is a soul from Limbo guiding the living pilgrim Dante through Purgatory to Heaven. Virgil then asks the spirit about the earthquake and the accompanying shout of praise that shook the mountain. The shade explains that Purgatory is not subject to the kinds of weather or tremors that affect the mundane world. The mountain, however, does respond when a soul feels that its purification is complete and it is ready to move into Heaven. The will to do so, the shade goes on, is only acquired when the soul is purified, for so God’s justice has willed it. Thus all the souls cry out when the purified soul begins to climb. The shade then says that he is himself the one whose purgation has ended and who has now begun his climb toward Paradise. He identifies himself as Statius, the Roman poet and author of the Thebaid. He won fame as a poet and was given the laurel crown, and he mentions in passing that his poetic inspiration was from the Aeneid, a work that has inspired a thousand poets. Statius even expresses a desire to have lived at the time of Virgil, saying he would have spent another year in Purgatory for the chance to have met his idol. At this Virgil gives Dante a sign to remain silent, but Statius notices a smile flash across the pilgrim’s

face and asks what it means. With his guide’s permission Dante reveals that Statius is, in fact, in the presence of Virgil himself. When he hears this, Statius kneels down to embrace Virgil’s feet, but Virgil reminds him that both of them are shades, and Statius, rising, excuses his impulsiveness, saying that his love of Virgil made him err, forgetting that shadows are not solid objects. The poets, now accompanied by Statius, leave the terrace of avarice as Canto 22 opens. The angel removes another letter p from Dante’s forehead and recites the beatitude “Blessed are those who . . . thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5.6, NRSV), omitting the part of the verse referring to “hunger,” which will be heard on the next level. Thus lightened, Dante moves more quickly as he climbs toward the sixth ledge behind the swiftly moving classical poets. Virgil tells Statius that since Juvenal entered Limbo and mentioned to Virgil the love that Statius held for him, Virgil had felt a strong bond with the later poet. But Virgil wonders how a man like Statius could have been drawn to the sin of avarice. Smiling, Statius corrects Virgil’s misapprehension: His sin was not avarice but rather its opposite, prodigality—both sins are purged on the same terrace (as in Hell, the hoarders and the wasters are both punished in circle four). Indeed, Statius says he would be rolling those great weights in Hell right now had he not relinquished his sin after reading Virgil’s lines attacking avarice in the Aeneid (3.56–57), when Aeneas stands before the grave of Polydorus and recalls his murder by the avaricious Polymnestor. Virgil’s second question of Statius is more fundamental: There is no evidence of his Christian belief in the Thebaid. When, Virgil asks, did Statius become a Christian? Statius answers that just as Virgil had inspired him to be a poet, so Virgil had shown him the way to Christian faith. The words of Virgil’s FOURTH ECLOGUE, proclaiming a new Golden Age with the birth of a new infant from Heaven, were the source of Statius’s conversion. He goes on to explain that the new religion was just entering Rome as he read Virgil’s words, and he thought the message of the new preachers accorded so well with Virgil’s poem that he was

Purgatorio drawn to them. During the persecution of Domitian he helped the Christians, he says, so that before he completed his work on the Thebaid he had been baptized. For fear of persecution, however, he kept his faith secret, and for that lack of zeal he was required to spend 400 years on the terrace of sloth. Now Statius questions Virgil, asking where some of his fellow poets are now—particularly Plautus, Terence, Caecilius, and Varius. Virgil replies that all are in Limbo, along with Homer and several of the people in Statius’s epic, including Antigone and Ismene. By now though the poets have reached the sixth terrace, and it is after 10 A.M. They walk, as usual, toward the right, Virgil and Statius walking together and Dante following behind, listening to them speak of poetry. Suddenly they stop conversing as the three poets come upon a tree bearing a sweet fruit that cannot be reached because, like an inverted fir tree, the tree has large branches at the top and smaller ones below, making it impossible to climb. The tree is watered by a stream that flows down the cliff wall. From within the tree itself issues a voice calling out that the fruit and water are prohibited. The voice then cites five examples of abstinence, the opposite of the sin of gluttony. These include Mary’s abstinence at the wedding at Cana; the temperance of the women of ancient Rome, who drank only water; Daniel’s rejection of the food offered him by the king (Daniel 1.3–20); the simple food of mankind’s first age; and John the Baptist’s simple meals of honey and locusts (Matthew 3.4). Dante is still peering up into the tree as Canto 23 opens, trying to find the source of the voice. Virgil calls to him and the pilgrim obediently follows, still listening admiringly to the conversation of the two classical poets. Suddenly they hear the words of a psalm—Labia mea Domine—alluding to the 15th verse of Psalm 50 (51 in modern translations), called the Miserere: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise” (NRSV). With that a group of silent spirits begins to move swiftly past the poets. These, the spirits of the gluttonous, are an emaciated group of shades so thin that they remind the pilgrim of the way the Jews must have looked at the siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., when, he mentions, Mary devoured her own child. In the

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lean faces of the penitents the pilgrim says he can clearly read the word omo (man) because of the pronounced rings of their eyes. As Dante contemplates these figures, wondering about their famished state, one of them stares at him and cries out in pleasant surprise. Though his face is considerably changed, Dante recognizes the voice of his close friend FORESE DONATI. Forese begs Dante to tell him about himself and his two companions. But Dante is overcome by grief at the sight of Forese’s shriveled frame and asks the reason for his friend’s disfigurement. Forese responds that the souls on this ledge are purifying themselves through abstinence. For their penance they circle the ledge continually, passing the tree with its fruit and water with each round, thereby rekindling their hunger and their determined resistance to it. Now, realizing that Forese had died less than five years earlier, and knowing that Forese did not, in fact, turn to God until he was close to death (ll. 79–81), the pilgrim wants to know how Forese has already climbed so high on the mountain; Dante would have expected to see him among the late repentant in Ante-Purgatory. Forese’s answer emphasizes once again the efficacy of intercessory prayer for those in Purgatory: It was the pious prayers of his sweet and loving widow, Nella, that sped Forese to this height. From this reference to his virtuous widow Forese launches into a vigorous attack on the brazen women of Florence among whom she lives. Forese condemns their habit of wearing shamelessly revealing clothing on the city streets and prophesies that soon they will not only be condemned from the pulpits of Florence but have further reason to lament their actions before the infants of the present day begin to grow beards. But now Forese returns to his questioning of Dante: With the bystanders from his penitent group Forese has noticed Dante’s shadow and wants to know how he had arrived here in his living body. Dante responds that he was called from the life of sin that he and Forese had shared and has been given the grace to be led through Hell and Purgatory in his living flesh by Virgil himself, until he meets Beatrice. He then introduces Statius as the one for whom the mountain has just trembled.

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The Gluttons, from Canto 24 of the Purgatorio, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

As they keep walking along the sixth terrace, Dante continues speaking with Forese through most of Canto 24, while the other shades look on in wonder at Dante’s living body. Dante asks where Forese’s sister, Piccarda Donati, is, and who some of his companions are among the crowd around them. The virtuous Piccarda, Forese says, is now in Paradise. He then points out the poet Orbicciani da Lucca Bonagiunta, Pope Martin IV of Tours (known for his fondness for eels), the prominent Ghibelline Ubaldino della Pila (father of Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini della Pila and known for the elaborate feasts he hosted), Bonifazio de’ Fieschi of Genova (archbishop of Ravenna who negotiated the release of the imprisoned Charles II), and Marchese degli Argugliosi of Forlì (a notorious drinker of wine). The pilgrim is particularly drawn to Bonagiunta, who seems to wish to speak with him. When Dante

addresses the Luccan poet, Bonagiunta prophesies that a woman of Lucca named Gentucca will give Dante a reason to love the city of Lucca. In what is perhaps the most famous scene in the Purgatorio Bonagiunta then asks whether the pilgrim is the author of the poem Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore (“Ladies who have intelligence of love”)—the first canzone in the Vita nuova. The pilgrim takes credit in an indirect way, identifying himself as one who takes his inspiration from love and “gives form” to what love “dictates in my heart” (ll. 52–54). Bonagiunta, who seems to understand the pilgrim’s words better than most readers, says that he now understands the “knot” that held him back along with Guittone d’Arezzo (founder of the earlier Tuscan school of poetry) and Giacomo da Lentino (Jacopo da Lentini, “the Notary”), founder of the Sicilian school that introduced courtly poetry into Italy, from what he calls the Dolce stil novo (the sweet new style) used by Dante (and, by implication, by Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti, major poets Bonagiunta does not mention). Dante’s verse, Bonagiunta says, closely and directly follows the dictates of love, as his did not. As Bonagiunta finishes his observation, he and the other penitents rush off to continue their penance, while Forese lags behind to continue his conversation with the pilgrim. Longing to see his friend again soon, he asks Dante when he will return. Dante answers that he does not know how long it will be before his own death, but that his heart will certainly be there before him, because of the degeneration of his native city. Forese tells Dante to take heart and foresees that the “guiltiest of them all”—referring to his own brother, Corso Donati—will soon be dragged into Hell (Corso died in 1308). Forese then rushes off to join the rest of his group, leaving Dante to continue at his slower pace with Virgil and Statius. The pilgrim suddenly sees another tree before him on the path, laden with food like the first, but surrounded by shades reaching up and begging fruitlessly. Finally the shades give up and leave, and the poets approach the tree. Like the first tree, this one speaks to them. They are warned not to go closer and told that this tree is an offshoot of the tree that first enticed Eve, which is planted higher

Purgatorio up the mountain (in the Earthly Paradise). The tree then calls out two examples of the sin of gluttony punished—as usual, one from classical tradition and one from the Bible. The first example concerns the Centaurs, who became so drunk at Pirithous’s wedding that they tried to carry off the bride and several other women, only to be slain by Theseus and other guests. The second example refers to the army of Gideon: In his war against the Midianites Gideon is instructed by God to lead his army to a river and watch them drink (Judges 7.5–6). He then rejects all those who drink with abandon, putting their faces in the river, and chooses only the 300 men who drink more cautiously. Leaving the tree, the poets walk on in silence, lost in thought, until the voice of the Angel of Abstinence startles them. The angel, still blinding the pilgrim with his brilliance, points the way to the next level and erases another letter p from the pilgrim’s forehead. As Dante begins his ascent, he hears the words of the beatitude, blessing those who hunger for righteousness. Again the pilgrim feels the need to move on quickly, as it is 2:00 P.M. as Canto 25 opens. The three poets begin the ascent to the seventh level. As they climb, the pilgrim is struggling internally to ask a question, and, encouraged by Virgil to speak, Dante asks how the souls on the sixth terrace had grown so lean, since their bodies were shades and needed no food. Virgil answers with two obscure analogies, alluding to the myth of Meleager—who stayed alive only as long as a stick of wood remained unconsumed in his mother’s fireplace—and to the image one sees in a mirror. Neither of these analogies is very helpful, and Virgil then calls on Statius to explain the phenomenon. Statius gives a complex Scholastic description of the physical process of the formation of a human embryo, how that embryo develops through a vegetative and a sensitive (or animal) stage, until God breathes the intellective soul into the physically formed fetus. The spirit fuses with the physical body, Statius explains, as the sun’s heat fuses with the grape to form wine. On the death of the body the soul (with its vegetative, sensitive, and intellective faculties intact) falls to one shore or the other, ready for transport to Hell or Purgatory. Now since

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the soul is, in Scholastic terminology, the “form” of the body, it retains its formative power even when disembodied, and thus the air around the soul takes on the form of each individual—just as, Statius says, the air may be colored by a rainbow. That new shape accompanies the soul wherever it goes as its “shade.” Having been formed by the soul, the shade can see and hear, laugh and sigh, as the soul desires, just as the physical body did. Since the gluttons so strongly desired the fruit of the trees on the sixth terrace, their shades appeared emaciated, reflecting their soul’s hunger. By this time the pilgrims have reached the seventh terrace, the circle of the lustful. Here fire blasts out at them from the inner wall, while an updraft from the ledge pushes the flames upward, giving the pilgrims a narrow space to walk single file along the outer edge of the terrace. Terrified, Dante moves along, becoming aware that the shades on this level, burning within the flames, are singing the hymn Summae Deus clementiae (“God of supreme clemency”), a hymn that asks God to remove lust from the heart and to cleanse it with his purifying fire. At the end of the hymn the burning spirits all cry out, Virum non cognosco (“I know no man”), Mary’s response when told she would conceive and give birth to Christ. This example of Mary’s virginity is the first positive example opposed to the sin of lust. After the spirits sing through the hymn again, they shout out the second (classical) example of chastity: the virgin goddess Diana, who took to the woods to preserve her chastity and banished one of her followers, Helice, for being seduced by Jupiter. As the poets move along the outer edge of the terrace of the lustful at the beginning of Canto 26, the pilgrim’s body casts a shadow on the wall of flame, which draws the attention of the souls within the fire. One of the shades addresses the pilgrim, saying that the souls all thirst to know why he casts a shadow as if he is still alive. Before Dante can answer, a second group of shades approaches through the flames from the other direction. When the groups meet, the shades greet one another with brief and chaste kisses of peace. The two groups then call out the negative examples of lust: The newly arrived group shouts out, “Sodom” and “Gomorrah!” while the first group

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shouts the example of Parsiphaë’s unnatural lust for the bull. The two groups then move off, each in its own direction, as the penitents continue to chant their appropriate hymn. Now the souls who had been fascinated by the pilgrim’s body lean forward again to hear his words. He explains that he is indeed alive, and that a lady in Heaven has procured for him the grace to visit this realm to cure his spiritual blindness. Dante follows by asking the souls in the fire who they are, and who their counterparts in the second group are. After a moment of surprise (which Dante says fades quickly from the noble heart) the original questioner explains that the second group was made up of sodomites, who therefore cry out the examples of Sodom and Gomorrah to remind them of their own sin. The speaker’s companions, on the other hand, are guilty of heterosexual lust. Because such lust makes men like beasts, this group calls out the example of the bestial lust of Queen Parsiphaë. The speaker goes on to identify himself as GUIDO GUINIZELLI, the Bolognese poet whom Dante revered as the father of the sweet new style of love poetry Dante admired and advocated. Dante humbly offers to serve Guido in any way he can, and Guido asks why Dante has such love for him. Dante answers that it is because of Guido’s poetry, which he claims will be admired as long as the Tuscan language lives. Guido points ahead to another figure, whom he calls a “better craftsman of his mother tongue” (l. 117), praising this unnamed figure as a greater love poet than any. The poet should not be judged by reputation, Guido says: GIRAUT DE BORNELH is better known, but a lesser poet than the unnamed shade, just as Guittone d’Arezzo once was highly praised but now has slipped in public opinion. As Guido steps back into the flames, he asks Dante to pray for him. Finally Dante approaches the shade Guido has pointed out, politely asking his name. The shade responds in his native Provençal language (he is the only figure in the Comedy allowed to do so): He is the troubadour poet ARNAUT DANIEL (ARNAUD), who expresses sorrow for the sins that have led him to this level and asks that the pilgrim remember him when he arrives in Paradise. With those words Arnaut, too, steps back into the purifying fire.

The sun is about to set when the poets reach the Angel of Chastity, singing the beatitude Beati mundo corde (“Blessed are the pure in heart”). The angel tells them that before ascending farther, they must pass through the fire itself but advises them to listen to the words being sung beyond the wall of flames. Dante is terrified of the fire and holds back even as Virgil reminds him how he protected the pilgrim as they rode on the back of Geryon. But when Virgil assures Dante that only the wall of flame stands between him and Beatrice, the pilgrim is ready to brave the fire. Virgil goes first, asking that Statius follow behind the pilgrim. As they walk through the vicious heat of the flames, Virgil urges Dante on by talk of Beatrice. In the midst of the fire they hear a voice singing, guiding them to the other side, and as they emerge they realize it is an angel singing Venite, benedicti Patris mei (“Come ye blessed of my Father”). The angel’s brightness forces the pilgrim to turn his face away, as the angel urges the poets to make haste up the mountain while the light lasts. They hurry up the steep passageway cut into the rock until Dante’s shadow disappears, indicating that the sun has set, at which point each of the poets lies down on the step he occupies to spend the night. While gazing up at the bright stars, the pilgrim falls asleep for the third time on the mountain and for the third time experiences a prophetic dream just before dawn. In the dream Dante sees the biblical figures of Rachel and Leah. Leah addresses him, describing how her joy lies in making things with her hands, while her sister Rachel’s joy lies in contemplating her image in a mirror all day. Together the two clearly represent the active and contemplative lives. The pilgrim rises with the light, and Virgil encourages him with the knowledge that he will, today, be in Paradise. Dante climbs eagerly and, when they have reached the last step, Virgil addresses him again: Having been through the dark realm of eternal fire where he has gained a knowledge of sin, as well as the temporal realm of penitence where he has learned to redirect his will to the highest good, Dante no longer needs the intellectual guidance of Virgil. Dante is now free to follow his own will, until Beatrice meets him

Purgatorio here in the Earthly Paradise. Virgil crowns Dante the lord of himself. This is the last time Virgil will speak in the Comedy. Commentary When Canto 19 opens, it is just before dawn on Tuesday, Dante’s third day on the mountain. Thus his dream (like his earlier one in Canto 9) must be assumed to have prophetic power (indeed it looks forward to the sins he will encounter on the next three terraces). It is a dream that makes most sense when interpreted in the light of the discussion of love, sin, and free will in the last three cantos. In it the pilgrim sees a femmina balba (stammering woman), a hideously deformed woman who, as he continues to gaze at her, becomes seductively beautiful, singing an enticing song that holds the dreamer’s rapt attention. As Virgil interprets her later (l. 59), the woman is a Siren, like the mythological singers of classical legend who lured sailors to their deaths with their beauty and the hypnotizing charm of their song. He associates her with the sins punished on the three upcoming terraces—avarice, gluttony, and lust. She is thus (like the she-wolf in the Inferno) a symbol of the sins of incontinence. Like those sins, she is repulsive in her true nature but can appear desirable as she lures men to abandon the highest good for transient physical pleasures. In the dream a saintly woman appears to balance or counteract the femmina balba. This lady has been variously identified by commentators. Some believe she is Beatrice, some Saint Lucy (who rescued the pilgrim in his first dream), some the personification of Grace (which either Beatrice or Lucy could be). But if Dante intended either of these figures, he surely would have named them, as he does elsewhere. One interesting suggestion is that the lady represents Lady Philosophy. It is true that the dream recalls the pairing of the two allegorical figures of Fortune and Philosophy in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and that the femmina balba represents the worldly pleasures subject to Fortune’s power, but it seems inconsistent for Philosophy to have to call Reason (in the form of Virgil) to help her reveal the true nature of the femmina balba. The two figures—Virgil and the saintly lady—enact the

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process that Virgil had discussed in Canto 18 (ll. 61–66), where the faculty of human reason steps in between the will and its object to “defend the threshold of consent” (l. 63). It is Virgil who performs the function of reason in the dream. But it is the saintly lady who calls him—the point here might be something that Virgil (who, it must be remembered, is not saved) had left out of his explanation: the necessity of grace to help reason steer the will away from sin. Tearing through the Siren’s deceptive outer garments, reason penetrates to her true nature, represented by her foul “belly” (doubtless with sexual connotations), revealing her as false and as an abomination. His dream over, Dante leaves the terrace of sloth to the sound of the third beatitude: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5.4, NRSV). Readers have generally puzzled over the applicability of this beatitude to the sin of sloth. But among medieval theologians there was a long tradition of associating sloth with grief. Gregory the Great, in his commentary on the book of Job, listed the seven major sins but in place of sloth included tristitia (grief or sorrow). While most theologians used acedia, or sloth, where Gregory uses tristitia, sorrow was often seen as a branch or offshoot of the chief sin of sloth. Thomas Aquinas defines the sin of sloth as “an oppressive sorrow, which, to wit, so weighs upon man’s mind, that he wants to do nothing” and goes on to assert that a particular sin is sorrow concerning spiritual good—that is, sorrow over the rigors that a truly spiritual life might entail. Further Aquinas suggests that sorrow over a real evil may also lead to sinful sloth, “if it so oppresses man as to draw him away entirely from good deeds,” adding that this is what the apostle Paul intended in 2 Corinthians 2.7 when he warned those who repented not to be overburdened by paralyzing sorrow (ST 2.2, q. 35, a. 1). It may well be this last group that the angel’s beatitude refers to in this round: The slothful whose sorrow leads them to inaction must remember that they will indeed be comforted, and hence they should not be drawn away from zealous action for the good. As the poets enter the terrace of avarice, they observe the penitents lying facedown on the ledge,

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reciting the prayer Adhaesit pavimento anima mea (l. 73), or “my soul clings to the dust” (Psalm 119.25, NRSV). While nothing in this psalm deals directly with greed, Saint Augustine had written an influential commentary on it that read the psalm as a prayer rejecting the attachment to the things of the world. One of these prostrate souls makes the assumption that the poets, looking for the nearest way to the next level, must be penitents who are not required to stop on this level. For the first time the law of Purgatory is clarified: All penitents are not required to stop at each level but may pass over some of the circles if they are not guilty of the sin expiated there. This particular penitent, Adrian V, was a pope on earth, and he confesses his weakness for the sin of avarice. Once again Dante demonstrates the complex parallels and interconnections among his three canticles: In Canto 19 of the Inferno Dante encounters Pope Nicholas III, whose sin of simony is chiefly motivated by greed. Here in Canto 19 of the Purgatorio another greedy pope does penance for the same sin—but this time a pope who recognized the evils of papal greed and repented, and so is saved. But Pope Adrian does not assert his papal authority in Purgatory. When out of respect for his office the pilgrim kneels to him, Adrian reprimands him, telling him they are both simply servants. The scene alludes to an incident in the book of Revelation, when the angel of the Lord commands the visionary John to write down what he has seen, and John responds by kneeling to worship the angel. The angel stops him, saying, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you.” (19.10, NRSV). This is the spirit behind Adrian’s allusion to Matthew 22.24–30 (an incident also recounted in Mark 12.18–25 and Luke 20.27–35) when he quotes the words Neque nubent to the pilgrim. In the gospel the Sadducees (who do not believe in the resurrection of the body) pose to Jesus a problem that they assume to be a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of an afterlife: If a woman was consecutively married to seven brothers, who would be her husband in Paradise? Jesus rejects their frame, answering that “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the

angels in heaven” (22.30, NRSV). Adrian’s use of this is metaphorical: Bishops (including the pope as bishop of Rome) were symbolically married to their diocese—as, for instance, nuns were symbolic brides of Christ. Both bishops and nuns wore wedding rings. But like other marriages, Adrian implies, that relationship is nullified in the afterlife. Here he is simply another penitent. Dante’s return to the imagery of the she-wolf and the greyhound in Canto 20 recalls the beginning of the Inferno, though here the greyhound almost certainly represents Emperor Henry VII. Because Canto 20 refers to Philip IV’s suppression of the Knights Templars (which took place in 1307) but does not mention Clement V’s justification of that act in 1312, it is assumed that Dante wrote this Canto between 1310 and 1311. In the autumn of 1310 Henry announced his intention of traveling to Italy, and this may be what Dante alludes to when in lines 14–15 he asks when the greyhound will come. According to Hugh Capet later in the canto, the three positive examples opposing the sin of greed are recited aloud as part of the daily prayers of the penitents, and they may be cried aloud by individual sinners as the spirit moves them (ll. 118– 123). The first example (ll. 20–24) is a reminder of Mary’s poverty, recalling how she gave birth to Jesus in a lowly stable (Luke 2.7). The second (ll. 25–27) is the life of Fabricius Caius Luscianus, a Roman consul in 282 B.C.E. and censor in 275. Because Fabricius refused to accept bribes or gifts as was customary in such positions, he died impoverished, and the state had to pay for his burial. The third example is Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra in Asia Minor during the reign of Constantine (ll. 31– 33). Nicholas was born wealthy but reputedly gave his fortune away to help the poor. Dante refers to a legend that relates how when an impoverished local nobleman faced the possibility of having to sell his three daughters into a life of prostitution because he could not provide dowries for them, Nicholas secretly tossed bags of gold into the girls’ windows on three successive nights, thus saving them from lives of depravity. Of the three examples only the third demonstrates generosity per se, the virtue customarily cited

Purgatorio as the counter to avarice. But not all Christians have the resources to perform the kind of dramatic act of generosity demonstrated by Nicholas. Dante provides examples that relate to three different conditions of life. In the first Mary patiently accepts the poverty she is born into, since her heavenly reward is much greater than any earthly treasure. In the second Fabricius rejects the possibility of wealth, since morality is far more valuable. In the third Nicholas’s generosity enables others to shun immorality. Thus all three examples demonstrate virtuous action opposed to avarice. Through Hugh Capet Dante also voices his political ire against the French monarchy, Hugh’s descendants. There had been 10 kings of France between Hugh’s death in 996 and the time of Dante’s composition of Purgatorio 20—four of them named Louis and four named Philip. Hugh saves his greatest condemnation for Philip IV, but first he attacks three of his descendants named Charles. The first is Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX. Louis had married the eldest daughter of Raymond Berenger IV, count of Provence, and Charles married the count’s youngest daughter, Beatrice (her father’s legal heir). Upon Count Raymond’s death the brothers claimed all of Provence as their wives’ dowry in 1246. At this point Hugh recounts three other French territorial thefts—Normandy in 1202 and Ponthieu and Gascony in 1295—repeating the ironic refrain “to make amends” with each case, implying that his descendants “make amends” for previous bad deeds by worse deeds. But Charles of Anjou’s worst actions, according to Hugh, took place in Italy. After the excommunication of Manfred, the heir to Frederick II’s kingdom of Naples and Sicily, Pope Urban IV called Charles to Italy to take Manfred’s throne. Charles overcame Manfred at Benevento in 1266 and subsequently defeated Manfred’s heir, Conradin at Tagliacozzo, in 1268—after which he had Conradin beheaded in the public square in Naples. Following popular legend Dante even has Hugh accuse Charles of poisoning Thomas Aquinas (l. 69)—an unfounded charge: The octogenarian Thomas had died in 1274 en route to the Council of Lyons, to which Pope Gregory X had summoned him.

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With line 70 Hugh begins to move from retrospective into prophecy, as he looks at the actions of a second Charles, Charles of Valois, brother of Philip IV. It was this Charles who was summoned to Italy by Boniface VIII in 1301, ostensibly to pacify Florence but in effect to put down any active opposition to the pope’s policies in that city. Charles allowed the Black Guelphs under Corso Donati to subjugate Florence, and to order the exile of all the Whites, including Dante himself. Dante presents this as prophecy in the Comedy’s fictional world of 1300 but was feeling the real effects of it even as he wrote the lines. The third Charles denounced by Hugh Capet is Charles of Anjou’s son and heir, Charles II (also called Charles the Lame). Defeated in 1284 in a naval battle against the Aragonese in 1284 (who executed 200 of his followers to avenge the death of Conradin), Charles was imprisoned by his enemies for three years. Though crowned king of Naples in 1289, he never regained control of the country and in 1305 was in such dire financial straits that he married his young daughter, Beatrice, to the much older Azzo VIII of Este for a reputedly very large sum of money. The story contrasts sharply with the earlier example of Saint Nicholas. But the worst of all his descendants’ crimes, Hugh makes clear, will be Philip IV’s attack on Pope Boniface VIII. Facing excommunication because of his taxation of the French clergy, Philip sent a force led by Guillaume de Nogaret and the Roman Sciarra Colonna to arrest the pope at his palace at Anagni. On September 7, 1303, Philip’s ruffians captured the 86-year-old pope and took him prisoner, threatening to put him in chains and drag him away to execution. Meanwhile they violated the cathedral treasury and ransacked the pope’s palace until the people of Anagni rose up in defense of Boniface and freed him. Boniface was taken to Rome, where a month later he died, reportedly of “hysterical seizures.” While Dante despised Boniface for his corruption and political ambitions, he believed that the office itself was sacred and saw the pope as Christ’s vicar on earth. A physical attack on the pope was in effect an attack upon the body of Christ himself. Thus he has Hugh call Philip a “second Pilate” (l. 91), crucifying the body of Christ

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between the two “thieves,” Guillaume de Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna. Hugh then suggests that Philip will go even further than Pilate had gone, by violating the Temple itself: In this he refers to Philip’s aforementioned brutal suppression of the Knights Templars. The Templars, an order of crusading knights who had become rich and powerful by the 14th century, were charged with heresy and other vile offenses, and Philip tortured a number of them into false confessions without the blessing of the church. Philip, who owed the Templars a great deal of money, gained much of their wealth for himself when he crushed the order, and when his puppet pope, the Frenchman Clement V, decreed the end of the order in 1312, the Templars’ grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned to death in the presence of King Philip. Hugh concludes his discourse with the poets by citing the seven examples of punishment for avarice recited nightly in the prayers of the penitent on this level. Next to the examples of pride, these form the largest group of exempla in the Purgatorio. The examples include four classical illustrations—two at the beginning and two at the end—with three biblical examples in the middle. The first example is Pygmalion, brother of Dido (not to be confused with the Pygmalion who fell in love with the statue he created). Pygmalion had killed Dido’s husband, the Phoenician king Sichaeus, in the temple in order to obtain his great wealth. Dido, warned by Sichaeus in a dream, escaped with her husband’s treasure and founded the city of Carthage, leaving Pygmalion to pay for his murder and sacrilege. King Midas, the second classical example, was a king of Phrygia who had pleased the god Bacchus. Bacchus subsequently granted his wish to be able to turn things to gold by his touch. When he found that he was unable to eat or drink because all his food turned to gold, he asked the god to take back his gift (the story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 11.85–145). The first biblical example is Achan, who against Joshua’s orders looted some of the treasure of Jericho that should have been dedicated to God. In retribution Joshua had Achan stoned to death, along with his family (Joshua 7.1–26). Next is the example of the early Christians Sapphira and her

husband, Ananias, who sold land in order to give the proceeds to the apostles but held back some of the money for themselves. When Saint Peter rebuked them for their deceit, they fell down dead (Acts 5.1–11). The final biblical example is from the apocryphal book of 2 Maccabees 3.1–40, where Heliodorus, a lieutenant of Seleucus IV, king of Syria, attempts to steal from the Temple treasury in Jerusalem. A horseman in gold armor nearly tramples him to death. The last two examples are classical. King Priam of Troy entrusted Polymnestor, king of Thrace, with the care of his youngest son, Polydorus, and a large part of the royal Trojan treasury. When Troy fell, Polymnestor killed Polydorus and kept the treasure. Ultimately Queen Hecuba blinded and killed Polymnestor for the betrayal and murder of her son (see Aeneid 3.19–68 and Metamorphoses 13.429–435). Finally Marcus Licinius Crassus (who with Caesar and Pompey had been part of the triumvirate who ruled Rome in 60 B.C.E.) was well known for his greed. Crassus became proconsul of Syria in 55 B.C.E. and was killed in battle with the Parthians in 53. Crassus’s severed head was presented to Hyrodes, king of the Parthians, who poured liquid gold into its mouth in scorn for Crassus’s thirst for gold. The canto ends on a note of suspense, as the pilgrim is frightened by the earthquake and puzzled by the singing of the Gloria in excelsis. We will learn in the following canto that these are the signs that a soul has completed its purgation and is ready to ascend to God—in this case the soul of the poet Statius. The Gloria recalls the angels’ song at Christ’s nativity. On the individual moral level of the allegory the rebirth of Statius’s soul reflects the incarnation of Christ, the birth that saved all humanity. The “thirst” Dante describes as Canto 21 begins, which he calls “the natural thirst which nothing satisfies” (l. 1), is a thirst for knowledge, which according to Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1.1.980a) is the natural desire of all human beings (a passage Dante had quoted at the beginning of the Convivio). The knowledge the pilgrim Dante wishes to gain is the reason for the earthquake on the mountain. In the third line Dante remarks that the

Purgatorio only thing that can satisfy this natural thirst is the water Jesus offered the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.5–15: the water of everlasting life. The connection between the thirst for knowledge and salvation is a matter of some debate among commentators, but it seems clear that divine revelation is the one thing that can satisfy the natural thirst for knowledge. Dante is about to receive such a revelation in the form of Statius—who will eventually replace Virgil (i.e., human reason) as Dante’s guide. It should be noted that the natural thirst for knowledge (and thus for salvation) contrasts sharply with the unnatural thirst for gold implied in the figure of Crassus at the end of the previous canto and also looks forward to the beatitude that will begin Canto 22. Canto 21 is divided into two roughly equal parts: The first half is concerned with the explanation of the earthquake of Canto 20 and a theological clarification of the penitents’ ability to recognize when they have fulfilled their purgation. The second half focuses on the figure of Statius. Before introducing himself, Statius responds to Virgil’s inquiry regarding the earthquake by asserting two points about the mountain. First, he says, no outside forces can cause change on the mountain, so it is not subject to the wet and dry vapors that cause storms on earth or that cause earthquakes when trapped in caves, according to medieval theory. Only the direct influence of Heaven affects the mountain, since in effect anything beyond Purgatory’s gate is part of the territory of Heaven. The soul rising from Purgatory already belongs to Heaven; therefore when it receives the penitent’s soul, “heaven takes from itself into itself” (l. 44). This internal motion, then, is the cause of the mountain’s trembling and the accompanying song of praise. Each soul, Statius tells the pilgrims, is likewise free from the influence of outside forces (as is the mountain itself). Individual souls recognize for themselves when they have completed their purgation. The explanation for this is rooted in Virgil’s earlier discourse on love in Canto 17. Within the penitent soul are two wills. One of these is what Scholastic philosophers called the “absolute will,” which desires only to ascend to God (the

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“natural love” of Canto 17, l. 94). The other is the “conditional will,” which (as in the “elective love” of the mind in Canto 17, l. 95) mistakenly desires other things, and so is out of accord with the absolute will. In Purgatory the conditional will must achieve harmony with the absolute will through penance. Recognizing its error, the conditional will in its desire for penance counters the soul’s absolute will to ascend to God and keeps the sinner’s shade fixed to its penance until, aligned perfectly with the absolute will, it feels its penance has been completed. The soul is purified when the will is no longer divided against itself. This picture of the nature of Purgatory, like many of the other details of this canticle, appears to be Dante’s invention. But it follows naturally from the allegory of individual penance that Purgatory suggests. For Dante penance is internal, and satisfaction occurs when the will to sin has been redirected to the natural objects of the will—God, virtue, and ultimate happiness. As for Statius the allusion to Christ begun with the Gloria of the previous Canto continues when he appears to the pilgrims. For the only time in the Purgatorio Dante explicitly compares a figure to the resurrected Christ when he notes the parallel between Statius’s meeting the pilgrims and Christ’s appearing to his two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24.13–16). As his disciples failed to recognize Christ, so Dante and Virgil fail to recognize Statius, or his status as a figure of Christ. But just as purgation is a form of rebirth, so the reborn soul of Statius parallels the resurrected body of Christ. The parallel becomes closer when Statius’s first words to the pilgrims—“May God . . . give you peace” (l.13)—echo Christ’s words to the disciples on his second postresurrection appearance in Luke 24.36–39. Statius will accompany the pilgrim and Virgil through the rest of their journey up the mountain. Why Dante introduced this second guide for the pilgrim at this point is worth asking. For most readers Statius seems a transitional figure. As Virgil represented human reason and the tradition of classical philosophy, and as Beatrice will represent divine love and grace, Statius is the link between pagan and Christian Rome—a classical writer who

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(in Dante’s inventive history) became a secret Christian who embodies the virtues of the classical world transformed by the Christian faith. When Virgil finds that he cannot answer the question about the nature of the human soul in Canto 25, it is Statius who will step in and, with understanding shaped by faith, give Dante the appropriate answer. Two details of Statius’s speech are particularly worth noting. First he remarks that he has spent more than 500 years on the ledge of avarice. We learn later that he was on the terrace of sloth for another 400 years. Since Status died in 96 C.E., 1,200 years before the date of the Comedy, he must have spent another 300 years on other terraces or in Ante-Purgatory. For the first time Dante presents a picture of how long a soul might wait on the mountain before it is purified. Second, although Statius’s main success as a poet occurred during the reign of Emperor Domitian, Dante has Statius place his career during the reign of Domitian’s brother, Titus, who ruled from 79 to 81 C.E. Statius praises the “good Titus” for having directed the siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. under his father, Vespasian, ultimately putting down the Jewish rebellion, conquering Jerusalem, and destroying the Temple. For medieval Christians (following a tradition originating with Jerome and PAULUS OROSIUS) this was seen as God’s punishment of the Jews for their role in the Crucifixion of Christ. The event is referred to in the same way by JUSTINIAN I in Paradiso 6, l. 92. Since in Dante’s political view the Roman Empire was the necessary vehicle for the establishment of Christian society, he viewed the destruction of the Temple by Rome as an important symbolic victory. Statius’s aborted embrace of Virgil that ends Canto 21 has generally been interpreted as a sign that shades are physically unable to embrace. But clearly this cannot be the case, since Sordello and Virgil were able to embrace twice in Canto 7. It makes more sense to interpret Virgil’s admonition of Statius in light of Pope Adrian’s chastising of Dante in Canto 19. In a scene Dante must have extrapolated from the end of the Thebaid, where Statius sends his poem off to adore the footprints of the Aeneid (Thebaid 12.810–19), Statius has already

expressed effusive admiration of Virgil, perhaps inappropriately suggesting that he would spend another year in Purgatory for the honor of meeting his idol. As Adrian cautioned Dante, Virgil implies to Statius that the two of them are shades, no longer in their earthly bodies, and here in Purgatory earthly honors no longer have meaning. When Statius says he had mistaken shadows for solid objects, he refers not to their shadowy bodies but to the transience of worldly fame and glory. The angel of the terrace of avarice recites a part of the fourth beatitude in the beginning of Canto 22. The entire beatitude would read Beati qui esuriunt et sitiunt justitiam—that is, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” But Dante leaves out the esuriunt (who hunger), saving that for the next terrace, the circle of gluttony. Dante felt he needed to share one of the beatitudes between two terraces not because he was running out of beatitudes—he never uses the beatitudes blessing the meek or blessing the persecuted. He seems rather to have considered the reference to thirst to be especially applicable to the sin of avarice. Any of the desires associated with the sins of incontinence might be described metaphorically as a thirst. Further the earlier example of Crassus (20, l. 116) might contribute to this metaphorical image of a thirst for gold. The contrasting thirst—the thirst for knowledge and for the water of eternal life alluded to at the beginning of Canto 21—is the thirst that is blessed, and that will be satisfied. The majority of Canto 22 concerns the two great changes in Statius’s life—his repentance for his prodigality and his conversion to Christianity— both of which he credits to Virgil. It was his reading of the Aeneid (3.56–57) that led Statius to recognize his sin. In this passage Aeneas stands at the grave of Polydorus, murdered by his father’s trusted friend Polymnestor for the Trojan treasure he had with him (this is the third mention of Polydorus in the Comedy, including Inferno 30, l. 19, and Purgatorio 20, l. 115, not to mention the allusion to this Aeneid passage in the Wood of Suicides in Inferno 13, ll. 47–49; it was clearly an important source for Dante). Aeneas here laments the extremes to which the thirst for riches drives human beings.

Purgatorio Commentators have been concerned that Aeneas’s words condemn only avarice, not Statius’s specific sin of prodigality. Just how Virgil’s condemnation of avarice causes Statius to repent his prodigality is a much debated point. But it should be remembered that Dante had already made the point in Canto 67 of the Inferno that both hoarding and wasting involve an unnatural attachment to the gifts of Fortune. Aristotle had stressed the idea that vice involves a deviance from the mean between two extremes. With this in mind Thomas Aquinas had addressed both covetousness and prodigality as sins opposed to the virtue of liberality (ST 2.2, q. 118–119), and thus saw them as closely related: In morals vices are opposed to one another and to virtue in respect of excess and deficiency. Now covetousness and prodigality differ variously in respect of excess and deficiency. Thus, as regards affection for riches, the covetous man exceeds by loving them more than he ought, while the prodigal is deficient by being less careful of them than he ought. (ST 2.2, q. 119, a. 1)

One must imagine that Statius, versed in classical philosophy, could have drawn a similar conclusion after thinking about Virgil’s words. It should be noted that there is no historic evidence of Statius’s prodigality. In fact his contemporary Juvenal, whom Virgil credits with giving him news in Limbo of Statius’s admiration, asserts in his Seventh Satire that Statius was so poor that he would have starved to death without a wealthy patron. Dante may not have known this text—he seems to have had little direct acquaintance with Juvenal’s poetry, citing him only secondhand in his works. Or, if Dante did know Juvenal’s poem, he might have posited that Statius had impoverished himself through prodigality. In any case Dante uses Statius’s sin to demonstrate the complexity of avarice. As his positive examples of Mary and the nativity, Fabricius, and Saint Nicholas in Canto 20 had demonstrated three different positive responses to wealth, so Dante implies here that there are a variety of negative responses as well. Statius says that his conversion to the Christian faith was also sparked by Virgil. Virgil led him

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to Mount Parnassus (home of the Muses, hence poetry) and to God (thus implying a close connection between poetry and grace). It was Virgil’s reference in his Fourth Eclogue to the birth of a child from Heaven who would create a new golden age (a passage commonly interpreted by medieval Christians as a prophecy of the birth of Christ) that led Statius to sympathize with the new Christian preachers in Rome and, ultimately, to be baptized. Though the Thebaid is dedicated to Domitian, notorious persecutor of Christians, Statius claims that by the time he had “brought the Greeks to Theban streams” (22, l. 88)—that is, by the seventh book of the Thebaid, when the exiled Theban troops arrive at the Ismenus and Asopus, the rivers of Thebes, to begin their attack—he had already received Christian baptism. Virgil, eternally consigned to Limbo, seems to have been unaware of the implications of what he had been divinely inspired to write in the Fourth Eclogue. Statius compares him to one who walks in the dark, holding a light behind him for others to follow. Commentators have seen this metaphor as an allusion to a sermon of Saint Augustine’s in De symbolo ad catechumenos, 4: Augustine, in an apostrophe to the Jews, describes them as “carrying in your hands the lantern . . . of the Law, that you might show the way to others, while you lead yourselves into the shadows” (qtd. in Durling’s edition, p. 376). Thus for Dante Virgil, like the Jews, is in the ironic position of having access to the truth and turning his back to it. From this point on Virgil will appear a less and less reliable guide for Dante. However, the value of Virgil’s poetry is still implicit in this canto. Beginning here and extending over the next few cantos, Dante will explore the value of poetry, including the poetry of classical pagans, in the Christian world—a controversial topic in the Middle Ages. Dante portrays himself following behind Virgil and Statius and learning about poetry from them as they pass to the sixth terrace. Given what he has already depicted in this canto, one must assume that what he is absorbing about poetry has to do with its moral and ethical value. Allegorically Dante implies that the Christian reader can learn important lessons about morality by reading such ancient texts as the

148 Purgatorio Aeneid and the Thebaid—or, for that matter, modern texts like his Comedy. Canto 22 concludes as the pilgrims arrive on the terrace of gluttony. The tree that stands immediately before them clearly alludes to the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis, even issuing a warning (reminiscent of the prohibition of Genesis 2.15– 17) that neither the fruit of the tree nor the water that feeds it is to be touched. The tree is even shaped in a way that makes climbing impossible, with smaller branches at the bottom and larger branches at the top. The voice from the tree shouts out five exempla of abstinence or temperance, the virtue opposed to gluttony. The first, of course, is from the life of Mary. The other four alternate between classical and biblical examples. The Marian example involves the marriage feast at Cana (John 2.1–10), already alluded to in Purgatorio 13.29 as an example of charity. Here it is used as an exemplum of temperance: Mary, concerned for others rather than her own appetite, uses her mouth to pray for charity for others, rather than to consume food and drink. The second example of temperance involves the women of ancient Rome, who reputedly drank no wine but were satisfied with water. Thomas Aquinas alludes to this reputation (ST 2.2, q. 149, a. 4), citing Valerius Maximus as his authority. Aquinas was making the point that temperance was more requisite in some individuals than others, and he saw intemperate women as particularly vulnerable to sin. This example is coupled with the biblical figure of Daniel, who in Daniel 1.3–20 sets an example for other Jews in the Babylonian court of King Nebuchadnezzar by refusing to defile himself with food or drink from the king’s table. Like the Roman matrons, Daniel is in a special position in which temperance is particularly important. But Daniel’s deliberately chosen action goes beyond them and earns a reward from God—the ability to interpret dreams. Dante takes his fourth example (another corporate one) from well-known literary depictions of the first age of men, the classical golden age, particularly as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1.89–112 and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy 2, meter 5. Here people are portrayed as living in

harmony with nature and as not having learned to till the ground or cook their food. Thus they were not corrupted by gluttonous desires and lived contentedly on acorns, berries, and spring water. This example is coupled with the biblical figure of John the Baptist, who (by choice, not necessity) lived in the wild and consumed only locusts and wild honey (Matthew 3.4). As it did Daniel, voluntary abstinence wins John glory with God. The prayer of the gluttons whose emaciated shades pass the pilgrims in Canto 23 is taken from Psalm 50 (modern 51), the popular psalm known as the Miserere and cited already as the source of the song of the indolent in Canto 5. Verse 15, the passage the gluttons sing, reads, “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise” (NRSV). Through their prayer the gluttons emphasize that the most virtuous function of the human mouth is not gluttonous eating and drinking, but rather voicing praise to God. In this the penitents recall the example of Mary from the previous canto, where her actions at the wedding in Cana are explicitly used to demonstrate her temperance and her choice to move her lips in prayer rather than in gluttony (Canto 22, ll. 142–144). From this Dante moves to an allusion to another Jewish woman named Mary: The penitents, he says, call to mind the starving Jews at the siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. According to the account of the siege in Flavius Josephus’s The Jewish War (6.3), a young woman named Mary—driven to anger and madness by starvation during the Roman Titus’s siege of the city—killed, cooked, and ate her own nursing baby. That horrific act sets up this Mary as the opposite of the Virgin, her grim meal a grotesque parody of the Eucharist, her people the damned opposites of the Christians of Purgatory, her doomed Jerusalem (paying, as Dante had stressed in Canto 21, for the Jews’ part in the Crucifixion) the converse of the Heavenly Jerusalem toward which the skeletal shades are marching. In the gaunt faces of those skeletal penitents Dante claims to be able to read the word omo (man). This claim generally confuses modern readers, but Dante knew his audience would be familiar with the popular medieval notion that God had deliberately identified his human creation by designing

Purgatorio the face in such a way that one could read in it the word for “man”: The round sockets of the eyes clearly formed two o’s, while the arched eyebrows and the cheekbones, together with the medial line made by the nose, formed an m. Just why God had designed the faces of all humanity with the Latin language and alphabet in mind is a question that seems not to have occurred to anyone at the time. In a strange way this description of the penitents’ faces draws attention to the careful design with which God wrought the features of the human face and once more calls to our attention the misuse of one of those features—the mouth—by the gluttons on this terrace. Dante’s glad meeting with Forese Donati is one of the longest such encounters in the Comedy, running to some 200 lines between this canto and the next. His greeting—“What grace has been bestowed on me!” (l. 42)—is reminiscent of the delighted cry of Dante’s other Florentine friend BRUNETTO LATINI—“How marvelous!”—in Canto 15 of the Inferno (l. 24). (Other echoes of the Brunetto encounter will occur throughout this conversation.) Forese’s praise of his wife, Nella (a compliment by which Dante may have been trying to make up for some insulting language he had used toward Nella in his scurrilous tenzone with Forese in the early 1290s), reminds us again of the importance of intercessory prayer for the souls in Purgatory. But more memorable in this section is Forese’s condemnation of the immodest habits of the women of Florence. He compares them to the Barbacini, a semisavage tribe living in the mountains of Sardinia who in Dante’s time refused to recognize Pisan sovereignty over the region. The Barbacini were said to live like animals, and their women were rumored to be particularly lascivious and to go about bare breasted. Forese’s prophecy that the loose women of Florence would be attacked from the pulpit probably refers to sumptuary laws (laws governing the wearing of clothing) that were enacted in 1310 in the Constitutions of Florence by Antonio d’Orso, bishop of the city, prohibiting on pain of excommunication the wearing of clothing that exposed any part of the female torso. As for his prediction of the disaster that would befall the city by the time the babies of 1300 had reached puberty

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and begun to grow beards (that is, within about 15 years), one could choose from a number of possibilities: Perhaps Forese refers to the occupation of the city by Charles of Valois in 1301, or to the famine that assailed the city in 1302, or to the interdict placed on Florence in 1303. However, because of the implied 15-year span, many commentators believe that the disaster referred to is Pisa’s devastating defeat of the Florentine Guelphs at the Battle of Montecatini on August 29, 1315. Whatever the allusion, two points seem to be implicit in Forese’s prophesy. First, in the implied judgment of God against the city, it links Florence to the conquered Jerusalem alluded to earlier in the canto. Second, the loose morals of the Florentine women contrast with the strict behavior of the matrons of Rome alluded to in the exempla of gluttony (Canto 22, l. 145). If the strict morals of Rome made it the fitting instrument to conquer the corrupt Jerusalem that had crucified the Savior, Forese’s speech makes it clear where Florence stands by comparison. One last point of controversy in Canto 23 concerns Dante’s comment to Forese that the memories of times they spent together must be painful for him (ll. 115–117), as it was from that life (the dark wood of Inferno 1) that Dante was rescued and sent on this journey. Some commentators have assumed that Dante is specifically referring to the tenzone in which the two had engaged. This was a poetic exchange that involved six SONNETs (three apiece by Dante and Forese) in which they scurrilously insulted each other. The poems are filled with charges of gluttony, sexual impotency, and other shortcomings and abound in obscene double-entendres, often implying sodomy. In one poem Dante suggests that Nella freezes at night because Forese is unwilling or unable to perform sexually with her. It may be that the pilgrim is here regretting the misuse of his poetic gifts in such a vulgar manner, particularly now that, in the presence of Virgil and Statius, he has had a glimpse of the moral function that poetry ideally serves. On the other hand other commentators suggest that Dante is simply referring to a time when, as young men, Dante and Forese might have regularly caroused together, eating and drinking to excess, in a manner that has landed Forese here on this level of Purgatory.

150 Purgatorio The majority of Canto 24 is devoted to the pilgrim’s encounter with the Lucchese poet Bonagiunta Orbicciani. There are at least two good reasons why Dante should choose Bonagiunta for this important exchange concerning love poetry. First, Dante had pointed out what he considered the deficiencies of Bonagiunta’s poetic language in De vulgari eloquentia (1.13), calling it “municipal” rather than courtly. Second, Bonagiunta had criticized one of Dante’s idols, Guido Guinizelli, for using learned imagery in his love poetry. Bonagiunta, then, is the perfect choice for Dante to depict as gaining a realization, through the clear eyes of eternity, of precisely what his poetry lacked compared to Dante’s. Bonagiunta first delivers his prophecy about the young woman of Lucca. He stumbles over his words at first—perhaps this is Dante’s way of suggesting the inarticulate nature of Bonagiunta’s verse. Then he mentions that the lady will leave Dante with a good opinion of the city of Lucca. Many commentators have read this as a suggestion that she and Dante shared a platonic love relationship. The woman has not been absolutely identified, though some believe she is Gentucca de Ciucchino Morla, who could have known Dante when he stayed in Lucca in about 1306–08 during his exile. At that time she was married to Buonaccorso di Fondara, but there is no suggestion of a physical relationship between her and the poet. In fact it is possible that Bonagiunta’s allusion to this woman is a transition that will lead into the discussion of unselfish love that permeates the discussion of poetry that follows. The poem Bonagiunta refers to—Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore (“Ladies who have intelligence of love”)—is the first of the three canzoni central to the theme and structure of Dante’s Vita nuova. In the context of that work Dante sees the poem as the major turning point in his love of Beatrice, and of his love poetry: As his love of her changes from selfish, erotic, and physical to something pure and unselfish, so his poetry changes from focusing on his own suffering and desire to generous and unsullied praise of Beatrice herself (a technique he seems to have learned largely from Guinizelli).

Dante’s initial response to Bonagiunta is the single most debated tercet in the entire Comedy. In Musa’s translation it reads thus: I said to him, “I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes careful note and then, gives form to what he dictates in my heart.” (Canto 24, ll. 52–54)

While some believe that the “love” referred to here is the allegorical god of love depicted in Dante’s earlier love poetry, surely the lines must be read in the context of the discourses on love and will that have formed the central part of the Purgatorio. The whole task of a penitent in Purgatory is to harmonize his conditional will (that “mental love” of Canto 17 by which human beings seek partial goods through their free choice) with the absolute will that follows natural love and seeks only the highest good. The word inspires (spirare, or “to breathe,” in the original) is used again in Purgatory 25, l.71 and in Paradiso 10, ll.1–2 and in both cases refers specifically to the breath of God. It follows that Dante here refers to the natural love inspired by God himself for God himself, and that the ideal poetry is that which follows the dictates of that natural love. His love of Beatrice is a love of God through Beatrice, one of the partial goods of God’s good creation and God’s agent to lead him to salvation. Bonagiunta’s response has been nearly as controversial as Dante’s three-line poetic manifesto. The central question involves the application of the term Dolce stil novo (sweet new style). Is Bonagiunta referring to poets like Cavalcanti and Guinizelli as well as Dante himself (since he has not mentioned those two poets as being held back by the “knot” that restrained him and all the poets of the Tuscan and Sicilian schools of poetry); or does Bonagiunta mean to apply the label only to Dante himself? Dante does not seem to want to include Cavalcanti and Guinizelli among the unenlightened poets, since their verse inspired and shaped his own. In that sense they are part of the “sweet new style” in its broadest application. But Dante implies that his Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore is a significant break from all previous poetry, even his own. Further Bonagiunta speaks of the “sweet new

Purgatorio style” that he is currently hearing (l. 57), implying that Dante’s very speech reflects the style of his poetry. This suggests, first, that the Dolce stil novo involves naturalness of expression rather than intricately wrought language—a “naturalness” that relates directly to the natural love that Dante says directs his poetry. Second, it suggests that the poetry of the Comedy itself, the lofty goal of which is the expression not of erotic but of divine love, is the purest and most immediate example of the kind of poetry Dante regards as Dolce stil novo. In an extended metaphor drawn from falconry Bonagiunta speaks of the “knot” that held him, Giottone d’Arezzo, and Giacomo da Lentino back. The knot refers to the falcon’s leash that prevents him from flying from his perch. In lines 58–60 Bonagiunta speaks of the penne with which Dante the poet follows love. Penne may mean “pens”— that is, Dante takes down the dictation of love with his pen in order to create his poetry; or it may mean feathers—through his verse Dante takes flight like a falcon, flying toward love. It is a flight Bonagiunta was prevented from making. But what specifically is the “knot” he refers to? Bonagiunta must refer to the attitudes toward love expressed by these earlier poets. If their poetry was self-centered and erotic, it was surely a reflection of their own attitudes toward love. That love—selfish and greedy—was the kind of misdirected mental love sought by the conditional will. It is no accident that Bonagiunta is on the terrace of gluttony when the pilgrim meets him: Like the love expressed in his verse, gluttony is a vice caused by the excessive love of worldly things. At this point the positive example of the Virgin at the marriage feast in Cana and the penitents’ prayer of Labia mea Domine (“O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise”) in the last canto are more clearly in focus. The “sweet new style” is poetry through which the mouth declares the praise of the Lord. This is the use to which the poet Bonagiunta should have put his mouth, rather than drunkenness and gluttony, and the self-centered love poetry that he uttered. The second prophecy of the canto is from the mouth of Forese Donati and concerns his brother, Corso, leader of the Black Guelphs of Florence and hence Dante’s bitter enemy, who conspired with

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Boniface VIII and Charles of Valois to send the French army into Florence. Forese calls him “the guiltiest of them all” and says that before long he sees Corso being dragged off to Hell by a runaway beast. In fact Corso was condemned to death by his own party in 1308. There are differing versions of his death, but he seems to have fallen or thrown himself from his horse and been dragged by the horse’s stirrup until one of his captors thrust a lance through Corso’s throat. The beast that drags Corso in Forese’s prophecy may be this horse, though Dante may also be drawing on the folklore motif of a demonic beast carrying sinners off to Hell. It is also possible that the beast, metaphorically, represents Pope Boniface. Forese’s departure from Dante is memorable: As Forese rushes to catch up to his band of penitents, Dante compares him to a cavalry soldier galloping ahead of his company to win honor as the first to attack. One is immediately put in mind of Brunetto Latini, likewise racing to catch up with the group that has left him behind to converse with the pilgrim, and whom Dante compares with the winner of the footrace in Verona (Inferno 15, ll. 121–124). Brunetto and Forese greet Dante in a similar delighted manner, both present the pilgrim with a prophecy, and both exit as victorious individuals racing to catch their groups. Dante has difficulty recognizing both of them—Brunetto because of his burned features and Forese because of his emaciated face. Both are Florentines with whom Dante was close—Brunetto as a father figure and Forese as a brother figure. One, however, is in Hell, and the other is saved. Dante invites the comparison. The chief differences between the two figures, it seems, are their attitude toward their sins and their posthumous memories on earth as Dante presents them: Brunetto never mentions his sin at all but seems preoccupied with his own literary reputation, asking that Dante remember his Trésor, in which he hopes to live on. Forese’s memory is kept by his loving wife, whose prayers have sped him through Ante-Purgatory. And while the memory of Forese’s sinful life may cause him pain, he is now on the road to Heaven. Thus Forese recognizes a special grace in his meeting with Dante (Purgatorio 23, l. 42), while Brunetto sees only that it is “marvelous” (Inferno 15, l. 24).

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The canto ends as Dante encounters the second tree on this level, around which penitents gather like begging children, suggesting the ultimately infantile nature of gluttony. The first example of gluttony punished is taken from classical mythology. Ixion, king of the Lapiths, had developed a strong lust for the goddess Juno. Jupiter fashioned a cloud into the shape of Juno, and the unwitting Ixion slept with the cloud-woman (who came to be known as Nephele). From this union the Centaurs were born. Ixion’s human son was Pirithous, friend and companion of Theseus. The Centaurs were invited to the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia but became so drunk that they attempted to carry off the bride and other women at the feast. Theseus and Lapithae proceeded to slaughter the Centaurs for their outrage (Metamorphoses 12.215–535). The second example of the ill effects of gluttony is the biblical story of Gideon (Judges 7.1–4). So that the Israelites will not attribute their victory over the Midianites to their own power but rather to God’s, the Lord tells Gideon to lead his army to a stream to drink. Those warriors who abandon themselves to their thirst and put their faces directly into the water to drink are to be sent back to their tents. Those who show more self-control by cupping their hands and lifting the water to their mouths are chosen to go to the war (presumably they would not be carried away in the heat of the battle). Of 10,000 troops, only 300 are chosen to fight with Gideon, and these win the fight. This passage was often cited in the Middle Ages as an example of what might be lost through gluttony. The beatitude that ends Canto 24 is the second part of the beatitude from the terrace of avarice. Here the angel pronounces blessing on those who hunger after righteousness and who do not yield to their excessive appetites (ll. 151–154). The appetites referred to may be anything desired by the conditional will—excessive food or drink, the selfish love expressed in Bonagiunta’s poetry, the sodomy embraced (and not repented) by Brunetto. The righteousness hungered after must include Forese’s love of his virtuous wife and sister, and his condemnation of his brother and the brazen women of Florence, as well as Dante’s love of Beatrice and, through her, the highest good.

Canto 25 is concerned chiefly with the discussion of Dante’s question as to how the incorporeal bodies of the gluttonous shades can become emaciated—a question that concerns the essential nature of the aerial bodies in Hell and Purgatory. Virgil’s initial analogies are not much help. He alludes first to Ovid’s story of Meleager (Metamorphoses 8.260–525), the son of Oeneus and Althaea, king and queen of Calydon. At her son’s birth the Fates place a branch into the fire on Althaea’s hearth and announce that when branch has been consumed by the fire, Meleager’s life will likewise be spent. On hearing the prophecy, Althaea takes the branch out of the fire and hides it. Years pass, and the grown Meleager falls in love with Atalanta. For her he slays the great Calydonian Boar and presents her with its skin. But his mother’s brothers, Plexippus and Toxeus, take the skin back from Atalanta, and the outraged Meleager kills them. When Althaea sees her brothers’ bodies, she takes vengeance on her son by finding the branch and throwing it on the fire. As the branch is burned away, Meleager’s life ebbs from him. The point of the story for Virgil is apparently that the relationship between the two apparently incongruous things—the stick and Meleager’s life—parallels that between the soul and its airy body. Virgil’s second analogy—the body reflected in a mirror—is clearer. As the image in a mirror seems unrelated to the object being reflected but in fact is completely dependent on it, so the aerial body is essentially a reflection of the soul. Still this does not answer Dante’s question but merely describes the aerial soul with a simple analogy. The fact that Virgil hands the question off to Statius has been seen by some commentators as merely a courtesy extended to the poets’ new companion, but most consider the act more significant. Virgil’s authority, which has been diminishing since the pilgrims’ entry into Purgatory, will soon be superseded by that of Beatrice, and the Christian figure of Statius will ease that transition. On an allegorical level Virgil as human reason has reached the limits of his knowledge with questions about the soul. This question can only be answered with the aid of divine revelation, available to the Christian Statius but not the pagan Virgil.

Purgatorio    153 Statius’s answer is particularly difficult for modern readers because of its foundation in esoteric medieval scientific theories. It falls into three sections: the explanation of the generation of the human embryo (ll. 37–60), based chiefly on Aristotelian philosophy; the generation of the human soul (ll. 61–78), based on Scholastic philosophy but derived ultimately from the Bible; and finally the nature and formation of the aerial bodies after death (ll. 79–108), which is almost completely Dante’s own invention. Aristotle saw conception as the mingling of blood, and this is the notion, transmitted to the Middle Ages chiefly through the Arabic commentator Avicenna, that Statius outlines: Sperm is blood “perfected” in the heart, and in this perfected blood provided by the father is the formative power that mixes with the passive blood from the mother and forms it into the material body of the potentially human embryo. The active blood from the father develops into the soul of the fetus, first the vegetative soul (that which gives life), then the sensitive soul (that which allows movement and awareness). The fetus is now ready for the development of the intellectual soul, which makes it human. Before describing the manner in which the fetus acquires humanity, Statius takes time to refute the controversial Arabic philosopher Averroës, whom he calls “a mind wiser than yours” (l. 63). Averroës, finding no human organ in which it could reside, posited that the intellectual capacity, what Aristotle called the “possible intellect,” was a single universal phenomenon shared by all men, and not existing within individuals. It followed from this doctrine that there was no immortality of the individual soul (and therefore no judgment). Statius, however, provides the more orthodox explanation (following that of Albertus Magnus) that when the fetus has fully developed its vegetative and sensitive souls, God himself breathes into it a spirit that forms the intellectual soul (containing the possible intellect), which draws the other two souls into itself to form a single human soul. It is this soul that differentiates human beings from all other created things and that confers on humans the intellectual powers of speech, understanding, memory, and will. It should be noted that Dante’s

explanation is perfectly orthodox: It denies the position of Averroës on the one hand and on the other the position of the Greek Church, which held that the rational soul was present in the human embryo at conception. The Roman Church based its position on the description of God’s creation of Adam, where God first formed the body and only afterward breathed into it the living spirit that made it human (Genesis 2.7). After this lengthy prelude Statius finally turns to the question Dante had asked. The aerial body, he explains, is produced in much the same manner as the material human body. When the soul leaves the physical body at death, it still maintains the original formative principle that originated from the father. As it had earlier worked on the passive maternal blood to form the fetus, so after death it finds itself in a specific place—the damned soul on the shore of the Acheron, the saved on the shore

The Seventh Circle—the Lustful, from Canto 25 of the Purgatorio, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

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of the Tiber to await transport to Purgatory—and begins to work on the surrounding air. As sunlight forms a rainbow in the humid air, so the formative power of the soul produces a shade that has all the senses and powers of its human body. The aerial body, however, responds to the inner state of the soul. Therefore the craving for food experienced by the shades on the terrace of the gluttonous is directly reflected in their outward appearance. As noted previously, the aerial body and its properties are Dante’s own invention, necessitated by the demands of his narrative. On Judgment Day, as taught by orthodox theologians, the universal resurrection would occur and souls would be reunited with their earthly bodies. In the meantime however in order for Dante to witness the punishments of the damned and the penance of the souls in Purgatory, the souls must be depicted in a physical form, and here Dante uses accepted medieval scientific theory to justify his invention. Statius’s discourse completed, the canto ends as the pilgrims reach the level of the lustful. The hymn that the souls sing from the flames is a very ancient one, dating to at least the 10th century. The hymn, Summae Deus clementiae (“God of supreme clemency”), is better known today as Summa parens clementiae (“Parent of supreme clemency”). The third stanza of the hymn specifically asks that God burn away sinful lusts: Our loins and liver, diseased, Burn out with suited fire, So may they ever be girt up All sinful lusts put away. (trans. from Durling ed., 435)

The two examples of chastity, the virtue opposed to lust, include, of course, one from the life of the Virgin, followed by a classical example. The first quotes Mary’s words—virum non cognosco (“I know no man”)—in response to Gabriel’s annunciation that she would give birth to the son of God (Luke 1.34). The words are a reminder of the virgin birth itself but also of the generally accepted belief that Mary was in fact a perpetual virgin. The second example holds up the goddess Diana, who lived as a huntress in the woods in order to preserve her virgin state and who exiled the nymph Helice

(also known as Callisto) from her retinue after the nymph, “poisoned” by Venus’s lust, became the lover of Jove. According to Ovid the angry Juno transformed Helice into a bear, and Jove, in recompense, placed Helice in the heavens as the Great Bear (Metamorphoses 2.401–530). Canto 26 introduces the two types of sinners doing penance on this level and presents the two negative examples of the sin of lust. It also portrays two of the poets Dante most admired. The sodomites are identified later by Guinizelli as those whose sins were the same as that for which Caesar was called “Queen.” This alludes to a story told by Suetonius in De vita Caesarum (“Life of Caesar” 1.11.9) alleging that Caesar had committed sodomy with King Nicomedes of Bithynia, after which his troops greeted him with shouts of Regina (i.e., “Queen”). The sodomites move along the terrace in the flames clockwise, to the left, and so meet the first group of sinners going in the other direction. The sodomites are the only shades in Purgatory who travel this way, a fact of some significance, suggesting that this group of sinners moves in an unnatural direction. When the two groups meet, they exchange brief and chaste kisses with one another, after the manner prescribed by the apostle Paul, who advises the Christians of Rome, “Greet one another with a holy kiss” (Romans 16.16, NRSV). Clearly this is intended to contrast with the lustful kisses these sinners engaged in while alive. The examples that the sinners cry out are intended to represent their particular variety of lust. The sodomites cry out the names of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities destroyed by God with fire from Heaven in Genesis 19. The cities were destroyed because of their sins, and standard interpretation was that their chief sin was sodomy— when two angels visit Lot in the city of Sodom, the inhabitants surround his house, saying, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them” (Genesis 19.5). The heterosexual penitents shout another example, that of Pasiphaë and the bull. The daughter of Apollo, Pasiphaë was the wife of King Minos of Crete. She became infatuated with a black bull that Poseidon had given Minos, and she persuaded

Purgatorio Daedalus to construct a replica of a cow, made of wooden ribs covered by a cowhide. Pasiphaë hid herself within the wooden cow and allowed the bull to penetrate her. As a consequence of this union she gave birth to the Minotaur. The story was told both in Virgil’s Aeneid (6.24–26) and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (7.131–137). Pasiphaë’s bestiality seems an odd example for the presumably “natural” lust of the heterosexual penitents. Guinizelli explains that those in his group may not have committed unnatural sexual acts, but their unbridled lust exceeded the bounds of appropriate sexual behavior (as, for example, the laws of marriage), and therefore they were like beasts in their lusts (ll. 82–87). Dante’s putting the homosexual and heterosexual penitents together is a particular difficulty in this canto. In the Inferno Dante had placed the lustful in the first circle (and included only heterosexual lovers)—there lust was the first of the sins of incontinence. Sodomites, on the other hand were deeper in Hell, with the violent, their sin being classified as violence against Nature. Here in Purgatory the two are punished together. This does not represent a change of attitude on Dante’s part, but rather different organizing principles in Hell and Purgatory: Hell is structured according to classical Aristotelian ethics, while Purgatory is organized according to the Christian conception of the seven deadly sins. The only one of these categories of sin into which sodomy could logically fit was lust. The scene with Guido Guinizelli marks the culmination of a succession of meetings that began with Statius in Canto 20, in which Dante explores the nature and purpose of poetry, and his own debt to and relationship with poets of previous generations. Here Dante anticipates Guinizelli’s identification of himself and alludes to Guido’s most famous poem in line 72 when he mentions that surprise lasts only briefly in the noble heart—Guinizelli’s best-known canzone was called “Al cor gentil” (“The Gentle Heart”). Having depicted Bonagiunta recognizing the superiority of Dante’s “sweet new style” in Canto 24, Dante here acknowledges Guinizelli as his poetic father and the ultimate source of that style. Bonagiunta had attacked Guinizelli’s poetry, blaming him for changing the pleasant style

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of love poetry with obscure language. Guinizelli answered in a sonnet condemning as foolish one who believed that he alone had the truth. It is likely because of this exchange that Dante utilizes Bonagiunta (rather than the better-known Guittone d’Arezzo or Giacomo da Lentino, to whom Bonagiunta alludes) as the representative of the earlier, inferior love poetry in Italian. Guinizelli had died in 1276 and therefore has progressed this far on Mount Purgatory fairly quickly—the result, he says, of having repented long before his death. Having already been purged of the sin of pride, Guido deflects the pilgrim’s adulation, pointing to Arnaut Daniel as the “better craftsman” in the “mother tongue.” The pilgrim has had no difficulties earlier extolling his own poetic accomplishment—see, for example, his selfcongratulation in the canto on the thieves in the Inferno, a canto that occurs at about the same point in the Inferno as this one does in the Purgatorio (25, ll. 94–99). Now, however, the pilgrim seems also to have been purged of pride, acknowledging that Guinizelli has also influenced Dante’s “betters.” By this it seems likely Dante refers to Cavalcanti and perhaps CINO DA PISTOIA, two of Dante’s contemporaries whom some scholars identify as also having written in the “sweet new style.” Dante had already expressed his admiration for Arnaut Daniel, the 12th-century Provençal troubadour, in De vulgari eloquentia. Arnaut wrote in a particularly difficult style (known as trobar clus), and Guinizelli (echoing the words of his sonnet to Bonagiunta) says that they are “fools” who think Giraut de Bornelh a better poet (ll. 118–120). Dante had previously expressed admiration for Giraut as well (in De vulgari eloquentia). But Giraut is cited here probably because he was well known for his verses in the clear and simple poetic style known as trobar leu. Recall that Bonagiunta had criticized Guinizelli for his obscure verses. Guinizelli praises the troubadour who, as he did, wrote in the difficult style rather than the more popular poet who, as Bonagiunta, wrote in a more common manner. Guinizelli then denigrates the fickleness of popular reputation. Just as Oderisi of Gubbio in Canto 11 had commented how Giotto was now recognized as a greater painter than Cimabue, whom

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popular opinion had crowned before, so Guinizelli extols the superiority of Arnaut over Giraut—and adds, in passing, that Guittone d’Arezzo’s reputation has now justly declined. The “mother tongue” Guinizelli mentions has been the subject of some scholarly debate. It seems that Dante here sees all of the languages derived from Latin, including his own Tuscan dialect and other dialects of Italian as well as the languages of southern and northern France, as derived from the same “mother” tongue. Thus he sees Arnaut’s poetry as linguistically related to his own. Arnaut, then, is the best of vernacular poets (according to Guinizelli); Dante already walks with the best of poets in Latin itself. Arnaut actually says little—he gives his name, expresses regret for his sins, and asks that the pilgrim remember him when he reaches Paradise. He says this in relatively simple verse (not the complex poetry for which he was known), but curiously he says it in Provençal. Arnaut is the only non-Italian person in the Comedy allowed to speak in his own native language. In Canto 27 the Angel of Chastity recites the sixth beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5.8, NRSV). Commentators have noted that this beatitude is particularly appropriate here, since not only have the penitent shades’ hearts been purified of lust after this terrace, but since this is the final circle of Purgatory, those who move up from here have completed their purgation and are indeed about to be granted a vision of God. Before moving upward, however, the souls must go through the wall of flames, the last barrier that separates them from the Earthly Paradise. The pilgrim, still in his mortal body, naturally holds back from that last step. He indicates that he has seen men’s bodies burned. It is entirely possible that Dante had at some point witnessed an execution by burning—not an uncommon form of punishment in Dante’s time. In fact the Florentine commonwealth had sentenced Dante himself in absentia to death at the stake if he was ever caught in Florentine territory. That may in part be feeding the pilgrim’s fear here. But this final purifying fire seems necessary. It is, as has been suggested, the fulfillment of John the Baptist’s words concerning the Messiah:

“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matthew 3.11, NRSV). As the baptism by water initiated one into the Church Militant on earth, so here the baptism by fire initiates the shades into the Church Triumphant in Paradise; as the water cleansed the newborn soul of its original sin, the fire burns the vestiges of worldly sin from the souls entering Paradise. In his final act as Dante’s mentor Virgil makes several attempts to convince the pilgrim logically to enter the flames. It is only when Virgil’s argument transcends reason—when he reminds Dante that he will see Beatrice again once he has passed the fire—that the pilgrim steps into the flame. Since this is indeed the circle of lust, it may be that the pilgrim is to be seen as burning away any vestiges of impure love of Beatrice from his soul, so that when he emerges, his love for her has become absolutely pure. The angel on the other side of the flames sings, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father”—these are the words that, according to Christ, will be uttered by the Son of Man at the Last Judgment to those who have gained salvation. No doubt Dante expected the audience to remember how that verse continues: “Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25.34, NRSV). Thus now that the souls have passed through their purgation, they are ready to claim their heavenly inheritance. It is interesting to note that the baptistery in Florence (the same one that Dante alludes to in Canto 19 of the Inferno) contains a mosaic of the Last Judgment in which an angel is depicted opening a door and uttering these very words. We never see the removal of the last letter p from Dante’s forehead. Some scholars believe it may have been burned off in the fire. In any case he moves quite lightly up the steep pass until night falls. On this third night on the mountain the pilgrim has a third prophetic dream just before dawn. Less obscure than the two earlier dreams (in Cantos 9 and 19), this one is a vision of Rachel and Leah, the two daughters of Laban who marry the patriarch Jacob in Genesis 29–30. In the story Jacob loves Rachel and works for her father, Laban, for seven years in order to win her hand. On the wed-

Purgatorio ding night, however, Laban substitutes his older daughter, Leah. The furious Jacob is forced to work seven more years in order to obtain Rachel as well. Leah, however, bears Jacob seven children, while Rachel remains childless, until finally she is able to bear two sons, Joseph and Benjamin. In Dante’s dream Leah is seen picking flowers and making garlands with her hands all day long, while her sister, Rachel, spends all her time studying herself in a mirror. Rachel loves to contemplate her own eyes, Leah says, while Leah’s own joy lies in working with her hands. Standard Christian interpretation from at least the time of Augustine saw these two figures as symbols of the active and the contemplative life: Leah represented the good works, the deeds of the active life in the world; Rachel, the higher and eternal joy of the contemplation of God. Rachel’s mirror is not to be taken as a symbol of vanity but rather of reflection. As for her gazing into her own eyes, Singleton points to a passage in the Convivio (4.2.18) in which Dante asserts that philosophy contemplates the truth but also contemplates the act of contemplation (Singleton 2, 660)—thus Rachel’s eyes that see truth are themselves the object of her contemplative gaze. Since this dream must in some way prefigure the events that are about to occur, we must assume that Leah and Rachel parallel the two women Dante will meet in the Earthly Paradise. As Jacob was surprised to obtain Leah rather than Rachel, so Dante may be surprised to meet Matelda after being led to believe he was about to see Beatrice. Matelda, then, like Leah, must at least in part suggest the active life, while Beatrice will suggest the contemplative. Virgil’s final words to the pilgrim as they reach the Earthly Paradise at the end of this canto demonstrate that he has taken the pilgrim as far as human reason may reach. The purpose of Purgatory has been to reform the will, so that the human soul would freely will the good, as it had before the fall. The central cantos of Purgatorio had been concerned with the will and with sin as misdirected or perverted love. The pilgrim, having passed through Purgatory, now possesses a will completely in line with reason, and therefore conforming to the natural law by which the human will and love were

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directed toward the highest good. Thus, Virgil says, Dante no longer needs his guidance, and like the other souls that go to this place, is free to follow his own inclinations, which now will be free from sin. This explains the presence of the Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden, atop Mount Purgatory: The souls who reach this place are souls in whom human nature has been restored to its prelapsarian condition, and they are as Adam and Eve before the Fall. There has been some critical debate about Virgil’s language at the end of the canto, when he metaphorically invests Dante with a crown and miter to make him lord of himself. Does this suggest that Dante is now beyond the earthly power of the pope (the miter) or emperor (the crown)? Does it suggest that human society would, like the pilgrim, be in line with God’s original intent if it were ruled by the dual authorities of church and empire? I suggest that this passage relates the words of Marco Lombardo in Canto 16. Marco had explained that human soul, born with a natural inclination to love God’s creation, needed the guiding power of law to grow virtuous, and that the church and empire were originally intended to provide that guidance. But now the pilgrim, his will perfected, needs no law, of either church or state, but needs only to follow his own inclinations.

EARTHLY PARADISE AND MEETING WITH BEATRICE (CANTOS 28–33) Synopsis Eager to explore the pleasant garden he finds himself in, the pilgrim begins to wander through the trees. Birds sing sweetly in their branches, which are stirred by a gentle breeze from the east. As he moves deeper into the wood, Dante finds his path blocked by a clear stream. On the far side of the stream he sees a lady gathering flowers and singing. He calls to her, asking that she move to the bank of the river so that he may understand the words she sings. She turns—like a lady on a dance floor, Dante says—and then walks to the opposite bank as she sings. She then raises her eyes to him, and he is filled with a longing to cross the stream. She is only three paces from him, but he feels he cannot cross the water.

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The lady addresses all three of the poets (Statius and Virgil have walked up behind Dante), telling them that this place is the cradle of mankind (i.e., the Garden of Eden), and that if they are amazed to see her smiling here, they should remember the Delectasti me—the words of the 91st Psalm (92nd in modern translations): “For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy” (92.4, NRSV). She then asks the pilgrim whether there are other things he wishes to know. Dante is curious about the breeze and the running stream, remembering what Statius told him about the lack of changing weather on the mountain. The garden was raised to this height after Adam’s Fall, the lady says, to protect it from damaging weather. The breeze is simply the result of the movement of the heavenly spheres, she tells him. The breeze scatters throughout the world the seeds of the plants in the garden, which contains all the species of plant life on earth, and some that no man since Adam has ever seen. As for the stream, it is not like rivers on earth that spring from a source that must be replenished by rain, but is replenished perpetually by the will of God. There are streams on both sides of the garden, the lady says: This one is Lethe, whose water erases the memory of sin; the other stream is Eunoë, whose water restores the memory of good deeds performed. This is the place, the lady concludes, that ancient poets dreamed of on Parnassus (mountain of the Muses) when they sang about the golden age of mankind. At these words Dante looks back at his two companions and sees them smiling. The encounter is reminiscent of a pastorella—a lyric poem in which the speaker encounters a young girl in a rural setting. It continues in the opening of Canto 29, as she begins to sing like one in love. Hers is a holy love, however, as her song is the first verse from the 32nd Psalm: Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata (“Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered”). While she sings, she begins to stroll upstream along the bank of the river, and the pilgrim keeps pace with her on the other bank. They have not walked far along the water when the lady looks at him and tells him to pay close attention to what is about to occur.

A sudden flash of light fills the woods, and with it is a sweet melody on the air. So pleased is the pilgrim by the sudden beauty around him that he curses the sin of Eve that separated humankind from these paradisiacal delights. As the pilgrim ponders thus, the light becomes blazing and the music turns to a chant. At this point Dante invokes Urania, the muse of astronomy, to help him describe the heavenly procession that fills the remainder of this canto. Leading the pageant amid chants of “Hosanna” are seven golden, blazing candlesticks that the pilgrim first mistakes for trees. Bewildered, the pilgrim turns to Virgil, whose look indicates he is as confused as his ward. When the pilgrim looks back at the moving candelabra, the lady encourages him to look beyond them to see what follows in the pageant. The pilgrim moves as close to the water as he can and watches the pageant closely. The seven candlesticks make streaks of bright color in the air, and under this vivid sky march groups of figures dressed in white and crowned with lilies. First are 24 elders, walking two by two and singing a song of blessing for the Virgin. Next are the four sixwinged creatures from Ezekiel 1.4–14, each wearing a green crown. At the center of a square formed by the beasts is a two-wheeled triumphal chariot drawn by a griffin, whose wings rise higher than the pilgrim can see. The griffin has gold feathers and a white body scored with blood-red streaks. Three ladies—one red, one green, and one white—dance near the chariot’s right wheel, while near the left dance four other ladies in purple robes, led by one with three eyes. Two dignified elders march side by side behind the chariot, one dressed as a physician, the other carrying a sword. Next are four more humble men, trailed by a single old man moving as if in a dream. These last seven elders wear crowns of roses. When the chariot stops directly across the stream from the pilgrim, a great thunderclap is heard, at which the four beasts and the flaming candelabra halt. With this the canto ends. When the procession halts, the 24 elders turn toward the chariot and one of them sings three times a line from the Song of Solomon (4.8): Veni, sponsa, de Librano (“Come with me from Lebanon,

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Beatrice addresses Dante from the car, from Canto 30 of the Purgatorio, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

my bride,” NRSV), a line all the other voices echo. At that word a hundred angels rise above the chariot (Dante compares them to the dead rising at the Last Judgment), calling out in Latin a paraphrase of Matthew 21.9, “Blessed are you who come.” The angels all toss flowers into the air that rain down as they sing Manibus, O, Date lilia plenis (“O give lilies with full hands,” Aeneid 6.883). As the sun rises through a mist, a white-veiled lady appears amid the falling lilies, wearing an olive-leaved crown and green cloak over a red gown. Instantly the pilgrim recognizes Beatrice. Overcome by his emotions, the pilgrim turns to share these feelings with Virgil but finds that his old guide has disappeared. Recognizing that he has seen the last of his faithful mentor, the pilgrim breaks into tears—even the joys of Paradise cannot prevent him from mourning Virgil’s

loss. At this point Beatrice addresses the pilgrim by name—“Dante, though Virgil leaves you, do not weep” (l. 55). She chides Dante for his tears, saying that he will have other reason to weep. He looks up to face her sternness, and she tells him, “Yes, I am Beatrice” (l. 73), but her words are sharp with reprimand. The pilgrim looks down into the stream of Lethe but shrinks in shame from his own reflection. In compassion for the berated pilgrim the angels surrounding the pair begin to sing In te, Domine, speravi (“In you, o Lord, I seek refuge,” Psalm 31.1), a verse that goes on to say, “Do not let me ever be put to shame.” When the pilgrim hears this song, he begins to weep profoundly, and as he does so, Beatrice addresses the angelic choir, though she speaks for the pilgrim’s own edification. Dante was given natural gifts of such quality that

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he could have accomplished great things but has squandered his gifts. While she was alive, Beatrice says, she was able to lead him toward worthiness, but when she passed into her second life, the pilgrim lost sight of the path of truth and pursued lesser goods. So far gone was he, Beatrice says, that the only way to save him was by the extraordinary means she employed—visiting Limbo and persuading the shade of Virgil to lead the pilgrim through the realm of the damned. It would be contrary to divine justice, she concludes, to allow the pilgrim to cross the Lethe without shedding tears of true contrition. As Canto 31 begins, Beatrice turns from addressing the angels to addressing the pilgrim directly, charging him to speak and to confess to the truth of her accusation. When the pilgrim hesitates, tongue-tied, she orders him to answer her. Overcome by grief and shame, he is able only to choke out a nearly inaudible “yes.” Unappeased, Beatrice demands to know what was so enticing about all the things that drew him away from the path toward the highest good. He answers that the false joys these worldly goods promised were too appealing to him once he no longer had her to guide him. Beatrice approves of the pilgrim’s confession but presses on in order, she says, to make his resistance stronger next time. Having seen her own perfect beauty when she was alive, how could the pilgrim have been drawn to some other mortal being when she died? He should have immediately followed her to the ultimate source of eternal beauty and happiness, to God. Finally Beatrice tells the pilgrim to raise his “beard” (i.e., his face, l. 68) and look at her. When he gazes upon her veiled face, he is overcome by remorse for having loved any mortal thing after her. His guilt causes him to swoon. When he revives from his swoon, the pilgrim finds himself in the arms of Matelda, who is drawing him into the stream. He hears being sung the phrase asperges me (cleanse me), after which Matelda dips his head under the waters of the Lethe and lets him drink. Now Matelda leads the pilgrim onto the sacred shore, where he joins in the dance with the four ladies (the cardinal virtues) at the left side of the chariot. They were ordained to be the handmaids

of Beatrice long before she was born, they sing, and it is their function to lead the pilgrim to Beatrice’s eyes. In those emerald orbs he sees reflected the figure of the griffin. While the griffin itself does not change, the reflection alternates between the creature’s two natures (i.e., the divine and human natures of Christ). As the pilgrim stands transfixed by this reflection, the other three dancing ladies (the theological virtues) come forth and beg Beatrice to remove her veil and show the pilgrim her hidden smile. The canto ends with Dante’s apostrophe to Beatrice, lamenting his inability to express her unveiled beauty. When Dante the pilgrim finally, after 10 years, gazes on the unveiled face of Beatrice, her dazzling beauty temporarily blinds him. When he has regained his sight, he sees that the heavenly pageant is moving off toward the east. The pilgrim joins Statius and Matelda as they follow the pageant, finally halting in front of a towering tree, which proves to be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The tree is barren, without fruit or leaves, but when the griffin reaches the tree he attaches the pole of the chariot to it—returning to the tree a piece that had been taken from it, the narrator says. Immediately the tree bursts into blossom that Dante describes as brighter than violet, at which point all the company begins to chant a hymn, unknown to the pilgrim since it is one sung only in Heaven. The pilgrim, lulled by the music, falls asleep. When a voice stirs him from his sleep, he awakens to find Matelda bending over him and momentarily fears that Beatrice has left. But he finds that although the heavenly pageant has moved off, Beatrice has remained behind to guard the chariot, sitting under the tree and encircled by the seven maidens. She addresses the pilgrim, telling him that he will live outside the walls of Heaven for a short time before joining her eternally in the City of God. But first, she tells him, he should observe the chariot carefully so that when he returns to the world he can write about it. Obediently the pilgrim turns his attention to the chariot. As he watches, an eagle suddenly hurtles down from the sky, tearing through the tree and destroying the leaves and fruit before crashing full

Purgatorio on into the chariot. Next an emaciated-looking fox jumps into the chariot, but Beatrice chases it off. Now the eagle returns, shedding golden feathers on the cart. At that point a grieving voice from Heaven calls out, bemoaning the cargo that this little ship must bear. The ground abruptly opens up beneath the chariot’s wheels, and a dragon emerges. It drives its scorpionlike tail through the floor of the chariot, then wanders off. At that point the chariot begins to sprout feathers, until it is covered completely, wheels and all. Seven heads suddenly grow from the chariot itself, three from the pole with horns like oxen, and a one-horned head from each corner of the cart. Seated upon this monstrous beast is a harlot, who flirts sluttishly with a giant who accompanies her. But when she casts a lustful eye on the pilgrim, the giant beats her jealously and drags her and the monster-chariot away into the woods. As the final canto of the Purgatorio opens, the seven nymphs mourn the loss of the chariot by chanting the words of Psalm 79, Deus venerunt gentes (“O God, the nations have come”), which is a lament for the destruction of the Temple. Beatrice also mourns, with a face like that of the Virgin Mary at the Crucifixion. Beatrice then repeats the words of Christ from John 16.16 (“A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me”). Now Beatrice begins to move off with the nymphs going before her and nods to the pilgrim, Matelda, and Statius to follow. Beatrice tells the pilgrim to keep pace with her so that he can hear her words. She asks why the pilgrim does not question her, and he answers that she knows all his needs. Beatrice then utters a prophecy to the effect that the chariot broken by the serpent “was, and is not.” The eagle will not be forever without heirs, she says, and a time is coming when “five hundred, ten, and five” shall kill the giant and the whore. She admits that her words are obscure but tells the pilgrim that soon their meaning will be clear. She asks only that he remember them and repeat them to the living. Beatrice then instructs the pilgrim to describe the tree and its destruction carefully, adding that to rob the tree or break its limbs is to blaspheme against God. She tells the pilgrim he should

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already recognize why the tree is so tall and why it is wider at the top than below. Seeing that the pilgrim is confused, however, Beatrice tells him that he should carry at least some trace of her meaning, if not the words themselves. The pilgrim responds by asking why her words seem so far beyond his ability to understand, and Beatrice answers that this is to teach him how far apart are earthly and divine knowledge—and how far the pilgrim himself has strayed from Beatrice. Dante responds that he does not recall estranging himself from her, and Beatrice reminds him of his drinking from the Lethe—the fact that that stream made him forget his estrangement from her proves that such estrangement was indeed a sin. But she goes on to promise that from now on she will speak so that he can understand her words. The group has now arrived at the source of the two rivers of the Earthly Paradise (the Lethe and the Eunoë). When the pilgrim asks what these rivers are, Beatrice asks Matelda to explain (naming the lady for the first time), and Matelda excuses herself, saying she has already explained to Dante the functions of the two rivers. Beatrice says that perhaps something more important is clouding the pilgrim’s mind and then asks Matelda to lead him into the Eunoë. Matelda takes the pilgrim by the hand and invites Statius into the stream as well. Here Dante addresses the reader, saying that he would tell more of the pleasure of drinking from that stream, but that he has already completed the allotted space for his second canticle. So he merely says that he returned to Beatrice refreshed, and ready to rise to the stars. Commentary In Canto 28 Dante relies heavily on the literary convention of the locus amoenus (“delightful place”) usually associated with descriptions of the Golden Age or the Earthly Paradise. Such descriptions usually featured a beautiful garden of trees, various flowers, singing birds, and a gently flowing stream, set in moderate springtime weather and a soft breeze. The wood in which the pilgrim finds himself here seems to recall, and directly contrast, the dark wood of the first canto of the Comedy. There the pilgrim wanders in fear and confusion, having lost his way through sin and error, but glimpses with

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hope the sun shining on the peak of a mountain he tries to climb (Inferno 1, ll. 16–30). Driven back by the three allegorical beasts of sin, he meets Virgil and begins to make his way through Hell and Purgatory. In this canto, having completed that arduous journey, the pilgrim is ready to enter Paradise—what was represented by the sunlit top of that earlier mountain—and is about to meet his second guide, to begin the blissful half of his journey. He is about to begin again from a forest, but a very different kind of forest. In placing a beautiful young maiden gathering flowers into the picture, Dante not only recalls the image of Leah from his recent dream, but also draws from another literary tradition, that of the lyric pastorella. In this kind of lyric poem (popular among Provençal, French, and Italian poets for centuries), the speaker is generally a knight passing through a rustic scene, where he happens upon a lovely solitary peasant woman. As the poem progresses, the knight appeals to the woman to grant him her sexual favors, and she willingly obliges. Certainly Dante’s encounter with Matelda bears a number of the features of this genre, and Singleton points out some specific verbal parallels between this canto and Guido Cavalcanti’s pastorella beginning In un boschetto trova’ pasturella (“In a little grove I found a shepherdess”) (Singleton 2, 670). The pilgrim’s response to Matelda in the beginning of this canto suggests that he, too, is thinking in terms of the pastorella tradition, and he somewhat flirtatiously asks the lovely young woman to stand closer so that he can understand the words of her song. The three classical allusions Dante uses in describing this encounter underscore the sexual potential of this scene. When the pilgrim addresses Matelda, he says she reminds him of Proserpine (l. 49). The daughter of Ceres, Proserpine was snatched by Pluto while gathering flowers in a field and taken below to Hades become mistress of the underworld. Dante knew the version of this story in Ovid (Metamorphoses 5.385–408), and his description here reflects Ovid’s in some points. Later Dante compares Matelda’s eyes to those of Venus when, while kissing her son Cupid, she was accidentally pricked by one of his arrows and fell instantly in love with the ill-fated Adonis (Metamorphoses

10.525–532). Then as he looks at Matelda across the narrow stream, the pilgrim is reminded of the Hellespont and the story of Hero and Leander: Leander, a young man from Abydos, loved Hero, a priestess of Venus at Sestros, but their love was forbidden. Each night Leander would swim the Hellespont from Abydos to meet his love secretly in Sestros. When he drowned, Hero killed herself as well. All three classical allusions recall the destructive power of sexual passion. But far from being the sexualized shepherdess of the pastorella, Matelda is in fact the woman prefigured by Leah in the pilgrim’s dream, the allegorical figure of the active life of the soul. She is, moreover, the image of the unfallen Eve here in the garden (to whom the pilgrim plays a newly innocent Adam), and therefore beyond the sinful temptations suggested by the pastorella conventions. We are not made privy to the song she sings that the pilgrim, perhaps assuming it is a love song, calls her over to hear. But we can be relatively sure that the nature of her song is similar to that of the psalm to which she alludes (Psalm 92.5–6)—perhaps it is in fact the psalm itself. Frequently used as a part of the sunrise service of lauds, the psalm expresses joy in God’s creation, and love of the Creator. Matelda makes it clear that her love song is directed to God, and her fair welcome of the pilgrim is Christian charity. For centuries scholars have attempted to identify Matelda with a specific historical woman. The favorite candidate of early commentators was the countess Matelda of Canossa, or Matelda of Tuscany (1046–1115), a wealthy and powerful supporter of Pope Gregory VII in his struggle against the Emperor Henry IV (in fact, it was her courtyard where Henry stood barefoot in the snow as penance when he humbled himself to the pope). Given Dante’s political beliefs, it seems highly unlikely that he would make such a partisan figure as Matelda of Canossa the model for his new Eve. Other scholars have suggested that Matelda is modeled on one of two German nuns, either Mechthild von Magdeburg (ca. 1210–ca. 1285, author of the mystical Flowing Light of the Godhead), or her younger contemporary Saint Mechthild von Hackeborn (ca. 1240–98, author of the Book of

Purgatorio Special Grace). If Matelda represents the active life, however, it seems unlikely that either of the German mystics, who clearly were known for their contemplative lives, would have been the model for Matelda. Some scholars have even suggested that Matelda, who serves here as a kind of forerunner to Beatrice, may be one of the ladies who serve that function in the Vita nuova. But a serious shortcoming of any of these identifications is that the figure of Matelda acts here as a kind of guardian spirit of the Earthly Paradise (as Cato served that function for Purgatory itself), and so must have been in this position since Christ’s death and resurrection reopened Paradise for humanity. She cannot therefore be based on a historical personage from only the previous century or two. Since she is not named until Canto 33 (l. 119), it seems safe to say that who she is is less important for Dante than what she represents. Perhaps Dante chose the name Matelda not to recall an actual woman but because the meaning of the name—“powerful in battle”—implies the active life of a soldier in the Church Militant. In response to the pilgrim’s questions about the breeze and the rivers in Eden, Matelda provides answers that could not have been supplied by Virgil, since they could be known only through divine revelation. The breeze, she explains, is stirred ultimately by the movement of the spheres, while the rivers of Eden are replenished by an eternal fountain created by God. Thus neither is related to any meteorological disturbance, since no such events occur on the mountain (as Statius had made clear in Canto 21, ll. 40–54). More specifically Matelda identifies this first river—which separates the pilgrim from Eden as the Jordan had separated the Israelites from the Promised Land—as the Lethe, the stream of classical myth the pilgrim had asked Virgil about in Inferno 14 when the ancient poet left it out of his description of the rivers of Hell. The pilgrim has read of the Lethe (the name means “oblivion”) in works by classical authors like Virgil and Statius, who make it the river in Hades from which dead souls drink and forget their earthly lives. Dante places the stream here in the Earthly Paradise, and Matelda tells him that a drink from the stream

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wipes out the soul’s memory of sin. As the pilgrim will move through Paradise, he will find that it is not true that the sins of the souls are completely forgotten. What seems to be forgotten are the despair and guilt associated with the sin: God’s forgiveness and grace in the face of that sin are remembered clearly. For the other river in Eden Dante coins the name Eunoë from the Greek eu(good) and nous (mind—here, probably suggesting memory). This river, Matelda explains, strengthens the soul’s memory of all good deeds performed in the world. The powers of the rivers are only effective, she stresses, if the shade drinks from them in the proper order. Matelda’s last words in this canto serve two functions: On the narrative level they allow Virgil and Statius to feel more familiar with Eden. At the same time they also relate to the earlier discussion of the value of classical literature implied by Statius’s praise of Virgil in Canto 22. Matelda says that the ancient poets who wrote of the Golden Age (who would include Virgil and Statius as well as Ovid and others) had, through inspiration, a vague glimpse of the true Paradise, the place in which they now stand. When Dante looks back at the two classical poets, they are smiling as they now see the truth clearly. Canto 29 is one of the most formally allegorical cantos in the entire Comedy. It begins with Matelda’s song Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata (“Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered”) from the penitential Psalm 32, which serves as a kind of summarizing beatitude alluding to those sung on the seven terraces of the mountain. The idea of the covering or hiding sins also looks forward to the pilgrim’s drinking from Lethe, whose waters will obliterate the sins in his mind. Before that happens, though, the pilgrim will witness the spectacle of the heavenly pageant. This is a vision so glorious that Dante feels compelled to invoke the Muses to assist him in describing it. Calling them holy virgins and so Christianizing his invocation of them, he calls them from their Mount Helicon, whose springs were sacred to them, and asks specifically for the aid of Urania, the muse of astronomy and, by association, of heavenly or cosmological themes.

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The procession that the pilgrim witnesses is depicted as a kind of formal staged masque representing the Church Triumphant—that is, the church in eternity, comprising the members of the Church Militant (the church in this world) who have died and gone to glory. As in a masque the individuals in the pageant represent things allegorically—they are not themselves the characters they may suggest (since the evangelist John appears in three different guises, for example, this would be impossible). The pageant is led by seven enormous candles that the pilgrim mistakes at first for trees. As do many other aspects of the pageant, this seems to be drawn from the book of Revelation, in this case 1.12, where John sees seven golden lamp stands. John first interprets these as symbolizing the seven churches (1.20) and later the seven “spirits of God” (4.5). From the candles issue a rainbow of seven colors that light up the sky under which the pageant moves. These colors, looming above the procession that represents the church, suggest the spiritual gifts that embrace and surround the church. Thus this rainbow has been interpreted since the Middle Ages as representing the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, usually listed as wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord and based on the qualities of the Messiah as described in Isaiah 11.1–3 (and discussed by Dante in his Convivio 4.21.11–12). In Revelation the seven lights surround the Son of Man (i.e., the Messiah), who then speaks to John. In Dante the colored lights issuing from the candles are called “streaming pennants” (l. 75), suggesting the banners that might accompany a royal procession. Further the voices that follow the candles sing out Hosannah, as did the crowd who welcomed Jesus on his entry into Jerusalem (Matthew 21.9). All of these associations combine to suggest the advent of Christ himself. The 24 old men who walk in pairs behind the candles are drawn from the 24 elders surrounding the throne in Revelation 4.4–5. There they represent the 12 apostles and the 12 tribes of Israel. Here they are meant to symbolize the 24 books of the Old Testament according to Saint Jerome’s numbering in his Vulgate Bible: Jerome counted

the 12 minor prophets as a single book and made single books as well of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah. As in Revelation the elders are dressed in white robes of purity, but instead of the golden crowns Saint John gives them, Dante has them wear garlands of lilies. The white of the lilies is intended to denote faith—the purity of their messianic faith in the coming of Christ. To illustrate this faith, the elders chant a song in lines 85–87 that recalls the words of the angel Gabriel in his annunciation to Mary, and the words of Elizabeth when she is visited by Mary, in Luke 1.28 and 1.42. Next at the center of the pageant are the four beasts and the triumphal chariot drawn by the griffin. The beasts—modeled on Revelation 4.8 and ultimately deriving from Ezekiel 1.4–14—are the angel, lion, ox, and eagle that surround the throne of God, taken in medieval iconography to represent, respectively, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four evangelists. The green garlands worn by the beasts signify hope, the hope of salvation promised in the Gospels. Their six wings (Dante here follows Saint John rather then Ezekiel, who gives them four) may suggest the speed with which the Gospels spread though the world. The chariot that the four beasts guard is a two-wheeled chariot, the triumphal chariot used by conquerors like Augustus when they returned to Rome in victory, though far more splendid. Thus the chariot itself represents the Church Triumphant. It is drawn by a griffin—a mythological creature with the head and foreparts of an eagle and the breast and hindquarters of a lion. Commentators assume that this creature represents Christ himself, who leads or draws the church. The dual nature of the griffin suggests the duality of Christ himself—half-man and half-God. The birdlike parts, aiming heavenward, imply the divinity of Christ. The white and red bands on the body of the lion suggest, respectively, the purity of Christ (whose life was without sin) and the sacrifice of his precious blood that redeemed humankind. The seven dancing women attending the chariot represent the virtues. On the right side (the privileged side) dance the three theological virtues—Faith, Hope, and Love (or caritas). Caritas is red (the fiery zeal of love); Faith is white (the

Purgatorio    165 color of the garlands on the 24 elders); and Hope is green (the color of the wreaths on the four evangelists). In the dance Faith and Love take turns leading while Hope consistently follows, suggesting the relative worth of the three virtues. On the left dance the four cardinal virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. These are the classical virtues, and therefore they are dressed in purple robes, the imperial color that associates them with the empire, the secular world, where they govern human moral conduct and make the organized commonwealth possible, thereby allowing a happy life in this world. Following the busy central group are seven additional elders, dressed in white like the first group but crowned in garlands of red roses denoting passionate Christian love. These figures represent the books of the New Testament. The first two characters symbolize Saint Luke as the author of the book of Acts, dressed as a doctor (Paul called Luke the “beloved physician” in Colossians 4.14) and Saint Paul as the author of the 14 epistles, who carries a sword, which may suggest Paul’s martyrdom by beheading or may represent what Paul calls “sword of the spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6.17, NRSV). This pair is followed by four figures suggesting the writers of the seven “catholic” epistles (so-called because they are general, rather than written to specific communities or individuals, as Paul’s letters are): Saint James the Apostle, Saint Peter, Saint John the Apostle, and Jude. Finally the last elder walking alone suggests the Revelation of John. This particular elder is described as moving as if in a trance, or nearly asleep, suggesting the mystical visionary nature of the text of Revelation. Thus the heavenly pageant encompasses all time, from Genesis to the end of the world, with Christ at the central point. It also, as some scholars have observed, forms the shape of a cross, with Christ and the chariot at the crossbeam and the seven virtues forming the arms of the cross. It is ritualistic, like a processional service in the church itself. And in its allusions to Revelation it recalls the heavenly vision of Saint John, thereby implicitly placing Dante in the same company as he begins his extended vision of Paradise. The thunder that punctuates the end of the procession is clearly a

supernatural sign (since as we know, no meteorological disturbances occur on the mountain), indicating the importance of this spectacle and of what is about to occur now that the pageant has halted directly across from the pilgrim. When Beatrice appears in Canto 30, it is in an atmosphere of significance. First, one of the elders representing the Old Testament (presumably the one representing the Song of Solomon) delivers the thrice-uttered invitation Veni, sponsa, de Libano, generally interpreted, as are all of the wedding poems in the Song, to refer allegorically to the bride of Christ (i.e., either the church itself or the Christian soul). Dante, however, had previously (in the Convivio 2.14.20) interpreted the spouse as divine wisdom (represented as female throughout the Old Testament). Sapientia, the

Charity, Hope, and Faith, from Canto 29 of the Purgatorio, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

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wisdom of God, seems to be one of Beatrice’s allegorical meanings. Old Testament wisdom, however, is associated theologically with the New Testament logos, the Word of God. Indeed, a number of points in this canto present Beatrice’s coming as an analogue of the second coming of Christ. The angels welcome Beatrice with the words Benedictus qui venis, echoing the “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” that echo the cries of the crowd at Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (Matthew 21.9). The fact that Dante changes the pronoun from he to you but maintains the masculine ending on the verb (Benedictus rather than Benedicta) encourages the reader to think of the original application of the cry to Christ. On one level the hundred angels who precede her appearance recall the Vita nuova (23.7), when Dante envisions a band of angels following Beatrice to Heaven. But Dante compares the angels to the resurrection of the dead that is to occur at the Second Coming, the Day of Judgment. Yet it is Beatrice who comes, and what follows will indeed be a scene of judgment for the pilgrim. Dante compares her to the rising sun (another image of Christ), and she is clothed in white, green, and red—the colors of faith, hope, and love worn by the participants in the pageant. Her olive garland is, as Dante notes (l. 68), sacred to Minerva, the classical goddess of wisdom—further associating Beatrice with Sapientia. On the literal level of the allegory then what is represented here is Dante’s meeting with his former love who has led him to God. On the moral level what is pictured is the human soul facing the examination of divine wisdom. On the anagogical level Beatrice represents the coming of Christ at the Last Judgment, when all souls will stand before him. Before Beatrice assumes her role as the pilgrim’s new guide, however, he must first bid farewell to the faithful Virgil. Dante first prepares us for this with the words Manibus, O, Date lilia plenis (“Oh give lilies with full hands”), used as the angels strew lilies in anticipation of Beatrice’s arrival. The words come from Virgil’s Aeneid (6.883), at the climax of the speech of Aeneas’s father, Anchises, in Hades, where he presents the future glory of

Rome and laments the premature death of Marcus Claudius Marcellus, the favorite nephew and heir apparent of Augustus, who died suddenly in 23 B.C.E. at the age of 19. There the line is an expression of pagan grief. Here Dante makes it a demonstration of Christian celebration. But it is also Dante’s tribute to his poetic master—a Latin quotation that is here used on the same level as the earlier biblical lines. But it is not his final tribute. As he recognizes Beatrice and turns to speak to his guide, the pilgrim intends to say, “I recognize the signs of the ancient flame” (l. 48)—the very words that Dido uses when she confesses to her sister, Anna, her love of Aeneas, the first love she has felt since the death of her husband, Sychaeus (Aeneid 4.23). In the case of Dido she feels she has broken faith with the dead. In the case of Dante he is reunited with his love—who is about to chastise him for breaking faith with her after her death. But when the pilgrim turns to address Virgil, his mentor is no longer with him. Dante’s first encounter with Beatrice may be somewhat disappointing for readers, who may have been expecting a loving and joyous reunion. Instead Beatrice seems haughty and stern, and her greeting leaves the pilgrim in tears. To readers familiar with the conventions of courtly love Beatrice seems like the disdainful mistress whose daunger makes her lover quake. One might be reminded of Guinevere in Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot or The Knight of the Cart: Lancelot, risking life, limb, and reputation, battles with numerous knights and crosses a lifethreatening sword bridge to rescue Guinevere from the Land of Gorre, only to be snubbed by her when he arrives for a small sin he committed against love. Here the pilgrim has reached the end of his arduous journey only to be chastised by Beatrice; Dante, however, is dealing with Divine Love, and the sins he has committed are not minor. The first word Beatrice speaks is Dante’s name— the only time his name appears in the Comedy (l. 55) Some scholars have seen in this the suggestion of a second baptism, as the pilgrim is about to enter a new life. Thus this marks the turning point of the entire poem: he is about to become a saved soul rather than a sinful one. Before that happens, though, the pilgrim must truly repent, and so Bea-

Purgatorio trice must be stern—more a loving mother figure than a disdainful lover—in order to ensure the pilgrim’s repentance. She begins with a sarcastic rebuke of Dante for being so slow in finding the road to human happiness, at which point Dante, looking down at his sinful reflection in the stream of Lethe, shrinks in shame. When the angels show compassion for Dante, Beatrice gently corrects them as well: they view the pilgrim as a saved soul, but Beatrice knows his sins and knows that he must repent them before drinking from the river of forgetfulness. She makes her case to the angels as if to a court of law, rather than addressing the pilgrim directly. Her narration essentially summarizes the action of the Vita nuova. In life, she says, she tried for 16 years to show Dante the way to true happiness in the highest good. After her death he was disloyal to her memory (as Dido was disloyal to Sychaeus), chasing after false images of the good (as Dante describes in Sections 35–39 of the Vita nuova). Essentially Beatrice is reinforcing what Dante has already learned from Virgil in Canto 17 about love of the good and love of false goods. That misdirected love has been Dante’s sin when he was left without Beatrice, and therefore he became so degenerate that only his journey through Hell could have led him to true contrition. He must, therefore, repent and confess now, as divine justice requires, before drinking the waters of the Lethe. In Canto 31 the pilgrim himself undergoes the sacrament of penance, with Beatrice in the role of confessor. Thus the canto encapsulates the pattern of contrition, confession, and satisfaction upon which the whole of Purgatory is structured. Beatrice compels the pilgrim to confess to the sins she has charged him with in the previous canto. The guilt and shame that the pilgrim has been feeling since Beatrice began her scolding are evidence of his contrition and allow him to speak only a muted “yes” in line 14 to begin his confession. It is not until the tercet in lines 34–36 that he completes his confession, admitting that he had pursued the false felicity of transient worldly things in the wake of Beatrice’s death. These things may have included physical pleasures, such as another woman (i.e., the woman from the window in the Vita nuova), or intel-

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lectual pleasures, such as philosophy (the allegorical meaning of the window lady, according to Dante’s Convivio)—anything that drew the pilgrim’s love away from the highest good, toward which Beatrice had been leading him. Dante’s confession is not enough for Beatrice, who continues to upbraid him to ensure his feeling of genuine contrition for his transgressions—so that, she says, he will be better able to resist the call of the Sirens when he hears them again (l. 45). The Siren image recalls Dante’s second dream in Canto 19, where the Siren seems to foreshadow the sins of avarice, gluttony, and lust of the following cantos. Here, however, we recognize that the dream also foreshadowed Dante’s own confession, and the woman of the dream who shows Dante the true nature of the Siren prefigures Beatrice herself in her role as confessor in this scene. When she died, Beatrice tells the pilgrim, he should have recognized that even the best of physical objects was a transitory joy, and his affections should have followed her immortal soul to the eternal realm, where they could have been led to the highest good, the source of perpetual felicity. When Beatrice tells the pilgrim to raise his “beard” to her (l. 68)—a sarcastic comment implying that he has been acting like a beardless boy— Dante compares his resistance to that of an oak tree finally uprooted by a storm, playing on the original Latin meaning of contrition as “ground up or broken” (recall the dark, crumbling step in Canto 9). The pilgrim’s remorse reaches its crescendo in lines 85–88, where he hates everything he had previously loved that was not Beatrice, and the shock of his guilt finally makes him swoon (l. 89). The swoon appears to be his “satisfaction”—it is an act that demonstrates his turning completely from his sin. One of the remarkable aspects of the first part of Canto 31 is the way it repeats, and in some ways perfects, the actions of Canto 5 of the Inferno. The allusion to the earlier canto begins in line 10, when Beatrice demands of the pilgrim, “What are you thinking of?” These are the very words addressed to the pilgrim by his other guide, Virgil, in the Inferno (5, l. 111) when he stood, as he does here, speechless with his head bowed. There the pilgrim was overwhelmed with pity for Francesca’s story of her

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ill-fated love of Paolo. Ultimately overcome by his sympathy for the sinful lovers, the pilgrim swoons. In this canto it is an overwhelming guilt over precisely the kind of misdirected love for which he had felt his earlier sympathy that causes the pilgrim’s speechless posture and, again, makes him faint. This time his feelings are in line with truth, and the discourse of the woman he responds to is direct, honest, and beneficial, as opposed to Francesca’s enticing, calculated, Siren-like words. The culmination of the pilgrim’s confession scene occurs as he awakens and is drawn by Matelda into the river. Here he receives his absolution, the act that completes his sacrament of penance, this time with Matelda acting as priest—this is, apparently, a role she serves for all the penitent sinners who have completed their satisfaction on the mountain. The pilgrim hears the words Asperges me (the full verse is “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow,” from Psalm 51.7, NRSV), sung presumably by the angels. These are the words repeated by the priest during the rite of absolution, when he blesses the penitent with holy water. The fact that Dante is immersed rather than sprinkled suggests a kind of baptism (though it should be noted that the act here cannot be taken as a literal baptism, since that sacrament is only to take place once). As in a baptism (and as suggested by the swoon from which he has just recovered) the pilgrim here dies to his old self and is reborn as a newly saved soul—one who, having drunk from the stream of Lethe, has wiped out the memory of his former sins. The second part of the canto records a series of highly symbolic allegorical rituals that serve to welcome the pilgrim—who now has crossed to the sacred shore—into Paradise. First he dances with the four cardinal virtues (Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance) that are identified with the four stars the pilgrim had seen earlier (in Canto 1, ll. 23–24, and Canto 8, l. 91). They are presented as Beatrice’s handmaids from before her descent from Heaven. Theologians made a distinction between the infused cardinal virtues (those born into a person) and the acquired cardinal virtues (those learned in life). Only Adam and Eve had possessed the infused virtues; the marring of human nature

caused by original sin meant that all other human beings had to acquire these virtues. Thus to say that these virtues were Beatrice’s even before she was born makes sense only if we consider Beatrice’s allegorical meaning as Sapientia or divine wisdom. In Proverbs 9.1 Wisdom is said to have “built her house, she has set up her seven pillars” (NRSV): the seven pillars were traditionally interpreted allegorically as the seven virtues. In the dance the pilgrim seems to acquire the four cardinal virtues, which seem to prepare him to receive the revelation he will see in Beatrice’s eyes. The pilgrim looks into Beatrice’s eyes as they look directly at the griffin. Here the green eyes are the color of hope, and they recall Dante’s earlier dream of Rachel in Canto 27, thus highlighting her allegorical meaning as the contemplative life. Reflected in her eyes the pilgrim sees the griffin (as the figure of Christ) alternating between his divine nature and his human nature, while the griffin itself remains unchanged as half-eagle and halflion. Here Dante seems to dramatize the words of Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 13.12: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (NRSV). Thus Beatrice, as the contemplative life, contemplates the great mystery of Christ’s dual nature as God and man and, in her role as revelation, reveals that nature to the pilgrim. As the canto ends, the three theological virtues (Faith, Hope, and Love, as enumerated in that same chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians) approach Beatrice and persuade her to look directly upon the pilgrim and remove her veil. Having seen in the mirror dimly, the pilgrim now sees her face-to-face, and the smile she bestows upon him suggests divine love and the grace of salvation. Canto 32, the longest Canto in the Comedy, opens with the pilgrim’s blinding gaze upon the face of his beloved Beatrice. The three theological virtues pull his gaze away from her, warning that his stare is too intense. Some critics have suggested that the virtues are scolding him for dwelling too intently on Beatrice’s human beauty. But since Beatrice has already chastised Dante for his love of transient things in the previous cantos, it seems more likely that this episode is allegorical. If Beatrice suggests the truth of Divine Wisdom, the virtues may be

Purgatorio warning the pilgrim that he cannot expect to drink in this truth all at once—he will need all of Paradise to learn what Beatrice has to offer. When the procession turns around and the pilgrim follows with Statius (mentioned here for the first time since Canto 28), the poet uses military language, calling the pageant a “glorious host” (l. 16) and comparing it in an epic simile to a retreating squadron (l. 19). The imagery indicates that the procession now no longer represents the Church Triumphant, but rather the Church Militant, the historical church in the world. The poets follow the pageant to the barren tree, which is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Here, after being blessed by the procession, the griffin utters his only speech in the pageant— words that echo those spoken by Christ to John the Baptist in Matthew 3.15: “It is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness” (NRSV). The words suggest the submission of the griffin/Christ to the sacrifice that will atone for Adam’s sin and redeem mankind. When he attaches the cross-shaped pole of the chariot to the tree, the tree bursts into life, the foliage suggesting new life (both for the individual sinner and for mankind in general), on one level, and on another—with its color between crimson and purple—the sacrificial blood of Christ. The allegory suggests, first, that the church (the chariot) is led by the true cross (the pole), and, second, that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross reversed the sin of Adam and Eve in the Earthly Paradise. The imagery also recalls the medieval legend (recorded in the 13th-century French prose Quest of the Holy Grail as well as Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend and other texts) that the wood of Christ’s cross was formed from a tree grown from a cutting of the Tree of Knowledge taken by Adam and Eve out of Eden. The connection of the cross with the Tree of Knowledge underscores the connection between Christ’s sacrifice and Adam’s sin. Dante compares the sleep that overcomes the pilgrim at this point to that of the disciples Peter, John, and James, who fell to the ground awe-struck after seeing the transfiguration of Christ (Matthew 17.1–8). That transfiguration, in which Christ appeared to the disciples in a shining white garment between Moses and Elijah, was (like the grif-

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fin’s transformation of the tree) a revelation of his divine nature. Like the disciples Dante awakens to find the glory somewhat diminished. In Matthew Christ has returned to his everyday appearance and Moses and Elijah have disappeared; here the griffin has disappeared with most of the pageant, and when the pilgrim sees Matelda’s face he fears Beatrice has left as well, but he finds her sitting on the ground, surrounded by the seven virtues. Beatrice essentially assures Dante of his salvation, then directs him to observe carefully what happens to the chariot, so that he can record the events when he returns to the world. Her words recall those of the angel to the apostle John in the book of Revelation 1.11: “Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches” (NRSV). Thus Dante depicts his role as a prophetic one, and the journey now explicitly moves from being the individual quest of the pilgrim to one with universal significance. After the griffin has departed (as Christ ascended to God the Father after the resurrection), the chariot of the Church Militant is left to deal with the world, and what the pilgrim Dante witnesses next is an allegorical reenactment of seven great catastrophes that have befallen the historical Church Militant up to Dante’s time. The first of these, the imperial eagle’s attack on the chariot, represents the 10 major persecutions of the church under the Roman emperors from Nero to Diocletian. The second, the fox that leaps into the chariot, represents the internal threat to the church caused by early heresies (like Gnosticism and Arianism). It is Beatrice, in her role as Divine Wisdom, who chases away the fox of heresy. The third affliction involves the return of the eagle, whose feathers now adorn the chariot itself. This represents the Donation of Constantine, the legendary grant that the emperor Constantine was reputed to have made to Pope Sylvester I in the early fourth century, ceding to the pope and his successors all temporal power in Western Europe. For Dante the Donation (exposed in the renaissance as an eighth-century forgery) was a disaster for the church, introducing to the papacy the corruption of power and wealth. He makes the point in De monarchia that rich possessions violated the true essence of the church.

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The fourth affliction is central to the history as Dante presents it and appears to be the most dangerous. The tail of the great serpent splits the chariot and pulls part of the cart away when it draws back. Again the book of Revelation is Dante’s inspiration, where a great dragon appears in the sky and “his tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth” (12.4). Here the allegory seems to refer to the advent of Islam, seen as a heresy by medieval Europeans—a heresy that drew off a third of orthodox Christians. For this Muhammad is punished among the sowers of discord in Canto 28 of the Inferno. In a sense this parallels the second affliction of heresy. With the fifth affliction more eagle feathers cover the entire chariot, including the wheels and the cross itself. This parallels the third affliction and represents further riches and secular power granted to the church during the reigns of the Frankish kings Pepin and Charlemagne. The sixth affliction (like the fourth) owes its inspiration to Revelation 13.1: “And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads.” As does the beast of Revelation, the chariot itself becomes a monster, sprouting seven heads. Most commentators believe these represent the seven deadly sins, which grew in the church once it had given itself over to worldly wealth and power. The final affliction depicted is, allegorically, the most complex, and Dante describes it in four tercets rather than in two, as he does the others. The scantily clothed strumpet who rides in the chariot is the whore of Babylon from the book of Revelation, “with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication” (17.2). For Dante the whore symbolizes the papacy, and the “fornication” alludes almost certainly to Boniface VIII’s collusion with the French monarchy in sending Charles of Valois to Florence in 1301. The giant in Dante’s scene suggests Philip the Fair, and his beating of the whore and carrying her and the chariot off into the woods represent Philip’s seizure of Boniface at Anagni in 1301, and the subsequent removal of the papal seat from Rome to Avignon by Pope Clement V in 1309. One unsettled question involves the whore’s lustful gaze toward the pilgrim Dante in line 154,

for which the giant beats her. Some commentators believe that the pilgrim at this point represents all of Italy, on which the pope looks greedily. Others have suggested that the pilgrim here represents the true Christian, who should be the concern of the papacy, though the entanglements of power do not enable that concern to bear fruit as the giant intercedes. The opening of Canto 33 reads like a liturgical service, as the seven virtues antiphonally sing a psalm that Beatrice answers in the words of Christ from John’s gospel. The words of the psalm—“O God, the nations have come into your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins” (79.1, NRSV)—allude to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C.E. The implication seems to be that the church, the modern-day Temple associated with the chariot, has been destroyed by the modern-day Nebuchadnezzar, King Philip of France. Dante compares the mournful Beatrice, listening to the virtues’ lament, with Mary at the Crucifixion—a comparison that seems less bold when we recognize that the church is the body of Christ in the world, making its contemporary destruction tantamount to a second crucifixion. When Beatrice speaks, it is with the words Christ used to announce his death and resurrection to his followers: “A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me” (John 16.16, NRSV). In her response to the psalm therefore Beatrice prophesies that the church, like Christ himself, will rise in triumph from this present sorrow—a theme that continues through the canto. As Beatrice begins to walk with the pilgrim and to explain the vision he has just witnessed, Beatrice’s words take on a prophetic obscurity, recalling once again the book of Revelation. When she refers to the chariot in lines 34–35 as something that “was and is not,” she echoes the voice of the angel of the Apocalypse who explains John’s vision of the beast in this way: The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to ascend from the bottomless pit and go to destruction. And the inhabitants of the

Purgatorio earth, whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, will be amazed when they see the beast, because it was and is not and is to come. (Revelation 17.8, NRSV)

So the church was and is not—that is, the true church no longer exists, having been corrupted by wealth and worldliness and dragged off to its “Babylonian Captivity” by the giant. But Beatrice’s allusion implies that the church also “is to come,” that is, will return to its former pure state. This is because the eagle will not long be without an heir. The eagle symbolizes the emperor, and for Dante, the last legitimate emperor had been Frederick II, who died in 1250. Dante lived in anticipation that a strong leader would emerge and ascend the Imperial throne, restoring order to the Empire and to the church as well. Beatrice’s enigmatic numerological code for the identity of the true heir of the Caesars—“five hundred and ten and five”—adds to the apocalyptic tone of this canto by recalling the number of the beast from the book of Revelation (13.18). But the identity of the figure designated by this number is obscure. Some commentators, writing the number as a Roman numeral, DXV, have reversed the last two letters to get DVX (i.e., dux), the Latin word for a secular leader. Most scholars assume that Dante intends this to refer to the Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg, who had entered Italy in 1310 but died of malaria in August 1313. Beatrice (from the viewpoint of Easter 1300) speaks of the advent of the eagle’s heir as a future event that will be unstoppable (ll. 40–42). This would suggest that Dante probably wrote this canto after 1310, but before Henry’s death in 1313. But since it seems likely that the Purgatorio was completed about 1318, this canto is almost certainly later than Henry’s death, and it may simply express some unidentified hope for the future of Dante. On an anagogical level, however, Beatrice’s prophecy of the coming world Emperor alludes as well to the Second Coming of Christ, who will be the ultimate emperor and will restore all to its right order. Beatrice admits that her words are obscure now but says that time will clarify their meaning. She

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tells the pilgrim to report them carefully when he writes this down, and particularly wants him to note what he has seen of the Tree of Knowledge, which she calls “twice-despoiled”: Adam was the first to despoil the tree, but Beatrice implies that the tree, which flowered again after its restoration by the griffin/Christ, has been despoiled again by the actions of the eagle, the dragon, and the giant. Beatrice goes on to discuss the height and shape of the tree, alluding to Dante’s own polysemous or multileveled allegory by speaking of the tree’s “moral” or tropological significance (l. 71). The tree’s height indicates how far beyond human understanding is the ultimate knowledge of good and evil. The shape of the tree—its inverted branches that spread wider the higher up the tree one goes—makes it impossible for man to climb, and thus underscores the justice of God’s prohibition of that which is beyond mankind’s ability to achieve. Beatrice goes on to apply this moral lesson to Dante himself: Much has been made prior to this of Dante’s desertion of Beatrice after her death. On the literal level he was lured away by the “window woman” of the Vita nuova. On the figurative level Dante abandoned theological knowledge for philosophy (in composing the unfinished Convivio) and thus was swayed by the belief that he could rely on human knowledge rather than Divine Wisdom. Charles Singleton cites Thomas Aquinas to explain why such an attempt could not be successful: Sacred doctrine derives its principles not from any human knowledge, but from the divine knowledge, through which, as through the highest wisdom, all our knowledge is set in order. (ST 1, q. 1, a. 6, ad. 1)

Beatrice, the allegorical figure of that Divine Wisdom, chides the pilgrim for his neglect. When Dante says he does not recall ever forsaking Beatrice, she reminds him he has just drunk from Lethe, which wipes out all memory of sin. The fact that the pilgrim cannot remember demonstrates clearly that his forgetting her must have been a sin—and a sin specifically related to Adam’s attempt to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. As this final canto draws to a close, we finally hear Matelda’s name revealed from the lips of

172 Paradiso Beatrice, and Matelda’s function in the Earthly Paradise is finally clarified. The fact that Statius is present here, and that Matelda washes both Statius and Dante in the waters of the Eunoë, implies that Matelda’s function as the “active life” is to take all souls, purged from their time on the mountain, and baptize them first in the Lethe (to wipe away their wrongful acts) and then in the Eunoë (to restore the memory of their virtuous acts). Since Beatrice has no particular interaction with Statius, it must be assumed that her presence here—and the entire pageant of the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant—has been solely for the sake of the pilgrim (as her appeal to Virgil was a special request aimed only at Dante). It must be assumed that Statius goes on from here directly to his eternal reward in the Empyrean, which Dante will glimpse at the end of the next canticle. The pilgrim, however, has learned that his journey is not really for himself alone, but that the vision must be recorded and shared with his fellow souls in the living world. The Purgatorio ends as the pilgrim rises from the restorative waters of the stream and returns to Beatrice “reborn, a tree renewed, in bloom / with newborn foliage, immaculate, / eager to rise, now ready for the stars” (ll. 143–145). The words relate Dante to the Tree of Knowledge itself, restored through Christ’s sacrifice. They also recall the conclusion of the first canto of the Purgatorio, when Dante had plucked the reed from the edge of a different river and was amazed by the miraculous growth of another plant, which immediately replaced the one Virgil had plucked (1, l. 135– 136). Thus the canticle concludes by reaffirming one of the chief themes of this middle section of the poem: the theme of rebirth or renewal. The act of penance—the basic model for Dante’s construction of Purgatory—is an act of renewal, through which sin is atoned for, divine justice satisfied, and the penitent soul newly purified, ready to go and sin no more. In the pilgrim’s case he is ready to move on to the stars—the Paradise that will be the setting of the third canticle of the Comedy. Like the Inferno the Purgatorio concludes with the word stella (stars), highlighting the pilgrim’s (and the reader’s) upward progress toward God, the ultimate goal of the entire journey.

Paradiso (1327) The Paradiso is both Dante’s highest poetic achievement and his most difficult text. The difficulty stems from two separate causes. In the first place this third canticle directly addresses difficult theological issues to a much larger extent than the INFERNO or the PURGATORIO. Dante is well aware of this difficulty, as he tells the reader at the beginning of his second canto that unless he is well grounded in philosophy and theology, the reader should not try to follow in Dante’s wake as he sails through the difficulty seas of this final canticle. He immediately plunges into difficult cosmological questions and follows these by discourses on the resurrection of the body, the role of the stars and heredity in shaping personality, the need for a variety of functions to be performed in the ideal society, and the question of divine justice—how can pagans be consigned to Hell when they have not had the opportunity to learn of Christ? Toward the end of the Paradiso the pilgrim is required to demonstrate his mastery of theology in a series of examinations, conducted by the apostles Peter, John, and James, concerning his understanding of the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. Such understanding seems here to be a prerequisite to the pilgrim’s ultimate vision of the godhead, the final goal of his long journey. The Paradiso’s other difficulty arises from the struggle that religious mystics have always had in relating their visions to a mundane audience: The experience of heavenly union—even of a fictionalized mystical vision like the one Dante presents—is ineffable. Language is the human way of expressing the sense impressions, experiences, thoughts, and arguments of the physical world as experienced by the human mind. An experience that takes place outside the body in a spiritual plane of existence is inexpressible in human language—a fact that Dante asserts through the “inexpressibility topos” in his first canto: “I have been in His brightest shining heaven / and seen such things that no man, once returned / from there, has wit or skill to tell about” (Canto 1, ll. 4–6). This theme of the indescribable nature of Heaven is underscored again and again throughout the Paradiso, culminating in the pilgrim’s final

Paradiso vision of God, wherein he receives a “great flash of understanding” that he never attempts to put into words (Canto 33, l. 140). Throughout the Paradiso, however, Dante does attempt to describe his experience in two ways. First, he depicts the pilgrim’s visions as concessions to his limited understanding, and the limited understanding of his readers. When he meets the souls of the blessed among the various spheres of the heavens, his guide Beatrice explains to him that the souls are really not here, but remain in the Empyrean Heaven in the presence of God. They have been in a sense projected to these spheres in order to help the pilgrim Dante understand the hierarchy of Heaven. Thus the entire first 30 cantos of the Paradiso are a kind of divine allegory, representing the abstract truth of Heaven in concrete images. These images include the great crusader’s cross formed by the souls of the warriors of God in the sphere of Mars, the Roman imperial eagle formed by the just rulers in the sphere of Jupiter, and the golden ladder on which the souls of the contemplatives move up and down in the sphere of Saturn. Dante’s second way of dealing with the inexpressibility problem is through innovations and experiments with his language. If normal human language cannot describe the experience of Heaven, then perhaps Dante can invent new ways of using language that are better able to convey his meaning. Thus it is in the Paradiso where Dante is the most daring and most creative in his use of poetic language. He invents more new words here than in all his other poetry. Often he employs function shifts—transforming nouns or adjectives into verbs. Often he creates new words by adding new prefixes, many using the prefix in- to suggest the piercing of normal physical limits, or the prefix tras- (English trans-) to imply going beyond mundane boundaries. Such innovations are most difficult to render in translation, but in this manner Dante manages in an astounding way to describe the indescribable. The basic structure of this Heaven Dante describes is fairly conventional, relying on the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian model of the geocentric universe. According to this model Earth is at the center of the cosmos and is orbited by nine crystal-

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line spheres. Each of these concentric spheres is composed of a special heavenly substance called ether, and each of the first seven spheres contains as well one of the seven planets: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in order from Earth outward. The eighth sphere contains all of the fixed stars, while the ninth sphere, called the Primum Mobile, sets all the other spheres in motion. Beyond the Primum Mobile is the Empyrean Heaven, a realm of pure light that is the home of God and the true eternal home of all the souls of the blessed, beyond the motions of the spheres that regulate time and create space. In Dante’s Christian vision God governs the motions of these spheres through a hierarchy of “intelligences”—his angels, whose movements, in perfect accord with the will of God, work out that will through astral influence on the natural world. According to Dante’s scheme the nine orders of angels are divided into three groups of intelligences, each containing three orders of angels—as always in the Comedy a reflection of the Trinity. The first three angelic orders—the Angels, Archangels, and Principalities, governing the Moon, Mercury, and Venus—contemplate God as the Holy Spirit. The second three—Powers, Virtues, and Dominions, governing the Sun, Mars, and Jupiter—contemplate God as the Son. The final three—Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim, governing Saturn, the fixed stars, and the Primum Mobile—contemplate God as the Father. This picture of the universe allows Dante to create a structure for his Paradiso that mirrors the structure of the first two canticles. As the first nine cantos of the Inferno deal with the pilgrim’s journey before reaching walls of the city of Dis that contain Lower Hell, and the first nine cantos of the Purgatorio depict the pilgrim’s journey through the Ante-Purgatory before reaching the gates of Purgatory proper, so here the first nine cantos deal with the lower section of Heaven—the first three spheres that lie within the conical shadow of the Earth. The souls within these spheres are accordingly still touched by certain mundane imperfections. Similarly the final cantos of the Paradiso, describing Dante’s final examination, his encounter with Saint Bernard, his view of the Mystic Rose,

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and his final vision of God, are set apart from the rest of the Paradiso in the same way as the final cantos of the Inferno—portraying the frozen bottom of Hell containing Satan himself—and of the Purgatorio—depicting the Earthly Paradise and Dante’s encounter with Beatrice—are set apart in their own respective texts. Thus Dante is careful to maintain a three-part structure for each of his three canticles. What disturbs many contemporary readers about the hierarchical structure of Dante’s Heaven is the necessary conclusion that the souls of the blessed enjoy different gradations of heavenly bliss. All the souls in Dante’s Heaven enjoy God’s love and grace, but it appears that this love and grace are not distributed equally. Even though, as Beatrice will assert, all souls have their home in God’s presence in the Empyrean Heaven, their metaphorical appearance in ascending order in the different heavenly spheres demonstrates the different grades of their beatitude. Dante the pilgrim himself finds this somewhat disturbing and raises the question in Canto 3 with PICCARDA DONATI, whom he finds in the sphere of the Moon, asking her whether the souls of this sphere have any desire to climb higher in the heavenly rankings. Her answer informs the remainder of the canticle. Each individual human soul has a different capacity for grace, love, and blessedness. It is God’s will that there be degrees of blessedness in Heaven, and through the mystery of predestination he creates each individual human soul with its own unique capacity for grace. Just as human society needs a variety of talents to create the ideal commonwealth, so Heaven would be lacking in some measure—the individual human personality would be lost—if all souls were absolutely equal here. Because each soul receives all the bliss he or she is capable of, no soul is envious of another, and because this is Heaven, all souls are in concord with the will of God. The Paradiso is indeed an intellectual challenge, but generations of readers have found the challenge to be worth the reward. Above all the canticle is a comforting one, in which the pilgrim—as himself but also representing everyman—receives assurances of his own salvation. It ends with the memory of heavenly bliss, and an eagerness to regain that

experience. It may well be that Dante’s poem is the closest expression of that experience ever achieved in human language.

ENTRY TO PARADISE: SPHERE OF FIRE AND MUSIC OF THE SPHERES (CANTO 1) Synopsis At the beginning of the Paradiso the narrator claims to have been to Heaven itself, and while it is impossible for the human memory to store such images, or for human skill to express them in language, he declares that Paradise will now indeed be the subject of his song. He invokes the god Apollo to make him worthy of such a task, asserting that if he is successful, he will crown himself with the sacred laurel. In language understood by students of astronomy in his time Dante refers to the Sun rising from the place where the “four circles” meet to form the “three crosses” (l. 39)—suggesting that it is noon in Purgatory at some time near the vernal equinox. Dante observes Beatrice looking straight into the Sun and instinctively follows her gaze, and it seems to him that he sees a second sun emerge in the sky. He moves his eyes back to gaze upon Beatrice, and as he does so, he feels himself change to become somehow more than human in a way that he cannot describe. Looking up, he sees all of Heaven ablaze and hears the harmonious music of the spheres as he passes through the sphere of fire. The pilgrim looks to Beatrice to tell him what is happening. She points out to him that he is no longer standing on Earth but soaring upward faster than the speed of lightning. The pilgrim questions how his body is able to ascend through the air, and Beatrice explains the situation to him as to an ignorant child. She declares that the universe is perfectly ordered, and that all things instinctively seek their proper place in this cosmic order. The love that characterizes the human intellect draws human beings naturally to God in the highest Heaven. But (as Virgil had explained in Canto 17 of the Purgatorio) the human soul may err through love misdirected and therefore may hold one down. Having purged himself of the weight of all sin by passing through Purgatory, the purified and hence weightless Dante is now able to rise through the heavens.

Paradiso Commentary Dante is about to relate a vision of Heaven itself, and while his account is surely fictional rather than the kind of mystical vision that might be related by someone like Julian of Norwich, for example, he does adopt the language of the mystic by evoking the “inexpressibility topos”—the convention that mystical experiences are essentially ineffable. In this he follows the precedent of Saint Paul, who in 2 Corinthians 12.3–4 asserts, “And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat” (NRSV). As he had in the Inferno and the Purgatorio he begins the Paradiso with an invocation, but this time, needing greater divine aid for his most difficult task, he invokes not classical Muses but their father, Apollo—the god of poetry himself. Dante follows the classical tradition that the Muses lived on the peak of Mount Parnassus known as Nisa, while Apollo himself dwelled on the other peak, Cyrrha. Dante expresses the hope that his poetic skill will reach its greatest heights in this last canticle of the Comedy and will earn him the laurel crown—sacred to Apollo and the ancient symbol of military victory as well as poetic achievement. The difficult and convoluted description of the position of the Sun in lines 37–44 needs explaining. The Sun rises from a different point on the horizon at different times during the year. On the spring equinox the Sun rises from a point where the circle of the horizon intersects three other great circles: the celestial equator, the circle of the ecliptic (the apparent path of the Sun through the sky), and the circle that astrologers called the equinoctial colure—a circle that passed through the two equinoctial points on the horizon (in Aries and Libra) and through the two poles of the celestial sphere. These three circles met on the horizon at the point of the vernal equinox, and as they crossed one another made three crosses (suggesting the cross of Christ as well as the Holy Trinity). Some commentators believe that the four circles and three crosses are also intended to symbolize the four cardinal and three theological virtues.

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This point of intersection is in the constellation of Aries, the Sun’s most favorable constellation because it was the one in which the Sun moved at the time of the creation of the world. All of this suggests a very auspicious sunrise, though it must be noted that since Dante began his journey on Good Friday 1300, reaching Purgatory on Easter morning, and has spent three nights on the mountain, the day on which the Paradiso begins is in fact Wednesday, April 13, and not the vernal equinox. However, since the Sun is in Aries from March 21 through April 20, the benevolent influence of that constellation still reigns, and perhaps Dante alludes to the intersection of the four circles in order to suggest the scientific background for the sanguine influence of Aries. When Dante looks up along with Beatrice and sees the Sun so bright that he believes God has made a second sun, the point seems to be that he is rising through the air, moving closer to the Sun without knowing it. When he speaks of what is happening to him, he uses the term transumanar (l. 70), literally “transhumanize,” or pass beyond what is human. This refers not only to the physical state of soaring into the heavens, but to the spiritual condition of grace infused from God—the sanctifying grace that (among other things) Beatrice represents. Having shed the weight of all impurity, Dante moves naturally toward the Empyrean, the highest Heaven, and the face of God. How this can happen is the topic of most of the rest of the canto. As Saint Paul is in the verse quoted earlier, Dante is unable to state with any certainty whether he ascended to Heaven in the flesh or whether only his soul made the journey— and that issue remains a mystery throughout the Paradiso. In lines 78–80 the pilgrim hears the music of the spheres, which is the sweet musical harmony created by the turning of the nine heavenly spheres as an expression of the cosmic harmony of God’s creation. He also passes through the “sphere of fire”—a region that, according to medieval astronomy, lay between the Earth and the Moon, and that was the source of lightning, which (contrary to the natural tendency of fire to rise upward) strikes downward at the Earth from this sphere. The pilgrim is bewildered, but his confusion over what

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is happening to him is answered by Beatrice, who (like other spirits Dante will meet in Heaven) has the ability to read his mind and can respond to his question before he asks it. There is nothing particularly new in Beatrice’s explanation. The middle cantos of the Purgatorio, particularly Virgil’s discourse on love in Canto 17, provide a good deal of background for Beatrice’s account here. She begins by asserting the perfect order of the universe, already demonstrated in the music of the spheres. She then expounds what is known as the principle of teleology, which holds that God created each thing for a particular purpose, and thus all things are naturally drawn toward their ordained goals or ends through the force of God’s love within them. Thus fire is naturally drawn upward (to the sphere of fire), or parts of the Earth to the Earth’s center (a kind of “love” that today we call gravity). The natural goal of beings (such as humans and angels) who have both intellect and free will is the Empyrean, God’s eternal realm that lies beyond the last moving sphere of the heavens. Impelled by their instinctive love of God, Dante and Beatrice are being drawn upward toward that Heaven. Using the image of an artist trying to create a perfect form with imperfect materials (ll. 127–132), Beatrice concedes that people may sometimes err through their free will—they may, as Virgil had explained, err through misplaced love of worldly things, which causes sin. But having been purified of sin in his climb of Mount Purgatory, Dante is ready for natural love to pull him toward God.

LOWER PARADISE (CANTOS 2–9) Synopsis As Canto 2 opens, Dante warns the reader who may have kept up with him this far not to attempt to follow him into what he calls the deep waters of his voyage, unless that reader is prepared intellectually and spiritually to follow. The poet now invokes Minerva, goddess of wisdom, as well as Apollo and the Muses, to guide his poem. Dante’s eyes are on Beatrice while hers are fixed above as the two shoot into the sky faster than an arrow, until they arrive at the first sphere, the sphere of the Moon, which Dante pictures as a

smooth diamondlike object. Here the pilgrim is amazed to find that he and Beatrice are taken into the Moon itself as light enters water, he says, or as God became human flesh in the Incarnation— there is no disruption of the substance they have entered. Curious at seeing the Moon’s smooth surface, Dante asks Beatrice the cause of the markings on the Moon that in Dante’s Italy were called Cain and his thorn bush. Beatrice first asks the pilgrim his own opinion of the matter. Dante suggests that the cause may be differing densities in the Moon’s surface. Beatrice first refutes this idea with several counterarguments of her own, until Dante is convinced of his human error. She then explains the true reason: The essence or light of God that flows into the universe from the Empyrean Heaven is differentiated in the sphere of the fixed stars according to the different qualities or virtues of the stars themselves. This spreads through the rest of the spheres and the angelic intelligences who inhabit and move them (as a soul does a body). Each heavenly sphere and its intelligence receive the light of God in accordance with their own inherent virtue—its degree of joy in beholding the face of God. These varying virtues are reflected in the differing degrees of brightness in the heavenly bodies. In the case of the Moon there is no single virtue but varying degrees of quality, influenced perhaps by a variety of angelic intelligences. Canto 3 opens as the pilgrim, recognizing his error concerning the Moon’s markings, raises his eyes to concede the truth of Beatrice’s explanation. But before he can speak, his attention is diverted by the pale images around him of faces that he takes to be reflections. He looks behind him but is puzzled when he sees no one there, and when he turns back Beatrice is smiling at his error. These faces are not reflections but the faces of the spirits of real people, those who in life had broken their religious vows and thus were assigned to this level of Paradise. They appear eager to speak and Beatrice encourages Dante to converse with them, saying they are filled with the light of God. The pilgrim addresses the closest spirit to him, who seems most eager to speak. She tells the pilgrim that he ought to remember her—she is Pic-

Paradiso    177 carda Donati, assigned to this lowest sphere of Heaven because she had forsaken her life as a nun. The pilgrim asks whether any of the spirits in this lowest sphere wish for a higher place in Heaven. Piccarda replies that the heavenly love within them makes them desire only the level to which the will of God has assigned them, for in God’s will is their peace. She then recounts how in life she took the veil at a young age, devoting herself to Christ, but was forced by hateful men (in fact her own brother, Corso) to leave the convent. She then introduces the shade of the woman beside her, Empress Constance, wife of Henry VI and mother of the Emperor Frederick II. Legend said that Constance had been a nun in her youth but had been forced out of the nunnery to marry Henry. According to Piccarda, though, Constance retained the veil in her heart the rest of her days. With that Piccarda fades back among the other shades, chanting an Ave Maria, upon which the pilgrim turns back to Beatrice, whose brightness is momentarily too much for his eyes to bear. The things he has heard from Piccarda have raised questions in the pilgrim’s mind, and as Canto 4 opens he stands poised between two nagging doubts, not knowing which to mention first. He is helped by Beatrice, who (as she did earlier) is able to read the pilgrim’s thoughts. She articulates both the pilgrim’s questions: First, can a just God reduce the heavenly reward of someone who, like Piccarda, was forced to commit an act against her will? And, second, if Constance and Piccarda are assigned here to the Moon, was Plato correct in his assertion that each soul returns at death to the star where it originated? Beatrice then addresses the second question, since as she says it is the more “poisonous” of the two. All saved souls—whether the Virgin Mary or Piccarda Donati—are assigned to the same Heaven, she asserts, and enjoy the bliss of Heaven to the extent that they are capable. These spirits have appeared here in the sphere of the Moon as a symbol of their degree of blessedness, not because they are permanently assigned here. As with the metaphorical language of scripture, this is a way of allowing the human mind to understand spiritual truths.

The Moon, from Canto 3 of the Paradiso, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

If Plato intended his doctrine of souls expressed in the Timaeus literally, then he was wrong, Beatrice says. If he was speaking figuratively to imply that the stars influence the lives of humans, then what he says is acceptable. The pilgrim’s other doubt, Beatrice tells him, is less likely to lead to heresy. The free will of Piccarda or Constance, Beatrice says, may not have contributed to the specific act that tore them from the nunnery, but an absolutely steadfast will could have returned them to the cloister when they were released. But Beatrice now forestalls another possible difficulty for the pilgrim: Piccarda had claimed that the empress Constance remained devoted to the veil (implying that her will never wavered), while Beatrice had said that her will was not completely constant. One seems to contradict the other, and Beatrice has already told the pilgrim that souls in Heaven do not lie.

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There are, Beatrice explains, both an absolute will and a conditioned will—one that in response to circumstances (e.g., fear of greater harm or hope of averting harm) might assent to evil. Constance’s absolute will never gave up the veil, but her conditioned will consented to her marriage. Thus Piccarda and Beatrice were both telling the truth. Satisfied with these answers, the pilgrim approaches Beatrice with yet another question that has been inspired by her explanation. The innate human desire for spiritual truth causes new questions to spring up like shoots at the foot of each new truth, the pilgrim explains. He asks Beatrice whether people might compensate for a broken vow by any number of good deeds, so that God might blame them less. As Beatrice prepares to answer him, her eyes are so full of divine love that the pilgrim nearly swoons. In Canto 5 Beatrice explains her increasing radiance, which was so stunning to the pilgrim at the close of the previous canto, as the result of her perfected vision, which draws her relentlessly toward the perfect love of the Highest Good and glows more brightly the closer she approaches to that Good. Looking into Dante’s mind, she sees that his own capability of understanding God is increasing as well. She also sees there Dante’s question about whether a soul can compensate for breaking a vow. Free will, Beatrice explains, is God’s greatest gift to man. The great value of a vow is that the human being, of his or her own free will, sacrifices that will (that greatest gift) to God. There is nothing that can compensate for this greatest of gifts. But under some circumstances the church releases people from their vows, Beatrice explains further. There are two aspects of a vow: the act itself and its sacred nature. Nothing can change the latter of these, the nature of the vow; one might, however, change the required act, or the substance of the vow. If one is to do this, however, the church itself must agree to the substitution, and the substitution must be of more value than what was originally vowed. Finally Beatrice warns against making rash, thoughtless, or foolish vows, citing the Old Testament figure of Jephthah and the classical story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia as warnings. Let the church and scripture guide you, Beatrice concludes.

With that Beatrice and the pilgrim ascend with uncanny speed from the sphere of the Moon to enter into the second Heaven, that of Mercury. Here they are surrounded by a thousand radiant beings, overjoyed to have more souls to add to their blessedness. One soul, recognizing Dante as a living being who has been granted the privilege of seeing the eternal realms “before abandoning the war of life” (l. 117), offers to answer any question the pilgrim might have. The pilgrim asks who the luminous soul is, and why he has been assigned to this particular sphere. The spirit glows even more brightly for joy and begins his answer, which will include the following canto. The radiant soul who has addressed the pilgrim identifies himself at the beginning of the sixth Canto as the sixth-century emperor JUSTINIAN I, and his speech fills the entire canto. He implies that before his conversion by Pope Agapetus I, he had adhered to the Monophysite heresy (which held that Christ had only a single, divine nature). Once converted, Justinian says, he gave his general Belisarius the task of leading his army and devoted himself to his great project (presumably the codification of Roman law, for which he is best remembered). Thus, Justinian says, he has answered the pilgrim’s first question—he has told who he is. Before moving to the second question—why he is in this sphere—Justinian feels the need to recount the history of the imperial eagle, revered symbol of the empire. It stayed in Alba Longa, where Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, had established it, for 300 years, until Romulus moved it to the hills of Rome. There it remained through seven kings until the Tarquins were deposed after the rape of LUCRECE and a republic was established in 510 B.C.E. It was carried by the armies of the republic against the Gauls (under Brennius), the Greeks (under Pyrrhus), and the Carthaginians (under Hannibal), reaching great heights under Scipio and Pompey and greater conquests under Caesar. Justinian recounts Caesar’s victories in some detail, mentioning his visit to Troy (the symbolic return of the eagle to its homeland), his defeat of Pompey and later of Pompey’s sons in Spain, his conquest of Juba, his defeat of Ptolemy, and ultimately his murder. With Augustus the eagle extends peace to

Paradiso the world as far as the Red Sea. But all of this pales before the chief event of the reign of Augustus’s successor, Tiberius—that is, the Crucifixion: Under the Roman eagle Divine Justice expiated the sin of Adam using the Roman eagle as its instrument. Further, under Titus, the Roman eagle punished the Jews for that death by destroying Jerusalem. Justinian now skips over seven centuries, including his own reign, to focus on Charlemagne’s defense of the church against the Lombards, thus identifying the Holy Roman Emperor with the sacred eagle of ancient Rome. Having demonstrated the connection of the imperial eagle with the ideal of Christian society, Justinian now looks at the contemporary heirs of the empire and condemns the GHIBELLINES (who claim the eagle standard as their own) and the GUELPHS (who set up a standard of yellow lilies against it). The Ghibellines, who claim to be true followers of the standard, lack justice, its necessary component. And the “new Charles” (CHARLES II OF ANJOU) is wrong to think he can tear down the banner of the eagle. Justinian now answers the pilgrim’s second question. The sphere of Mercury, he says, is peopled by souls whose deeds were prompted not solely by the love of God but also by the desire for fame. As a result of this desire these souls have a smaller capacity for bliss than others in higher spheres, but all is part of God’s justice and, as are the souls in the Moon, the ambitious souls of this sphere are content and part of the universal harmony. Justinian ends by pointing to another soul in this sphere, that of ROMEO DI VILLENEUVE. Romeo was, according to legend, a poor wanderer who became attached to the court of Raymond Berenger IV, the last count of Provence. Although Romeo was influential in arranging the marriages of Raymond’s four daughters, he was accused of embezzlement by envious courtiers, upon which he left the court and returned to his wandering lifestyle, begging door to door. Justinian asserts that Romeo’s fame would be even greater if the world knew what was in his heart as he wandered in exile. Justinian completes his discourse with a hymn as Canto 7 opens. The hymn (Dante’s own invention) is a prayer to the “God of hosts,” suggesting the military connection of the souls in this sphere,

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those who sought honor. The emperor’s radiant soul begins spinning in a dance to his own melody and is joined by the other souls in this sphere, who then spin off into space like shooting stars. The pilgrim now turns to Beatrice, yearning to ask her a question but hesitating out of reverence for her. But since Beatrice can read his mind, she senses that he is perplexed about Justinian’s comment that “just vengeance” (i.e., the Crucifixion) was “justly avenged” (i.e., the destruction of Jerusalem). Adam’s sin damned all of his descendants, Beatrice begins, until God, prompted by love, took on human nature. Thus the Crucifixion of Christ’s human nature, as payment for Adam’s original sin, was completely just, a “just vengeance.” However the torment of Christ’s divine nature was completely unjust, a sacrilege for which the Jews were culpable and deserved the “just vengeance” of Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 C.E. Beatrice now reads another question in the pilgrim’s mind: Why did God not choose another way to redeem the human race? This sparks a more complex response from Beatrice. Human nature, she says, resembles God because it was directly created by him (and therefore is free and eternal). But Adam’s sin marred human nature’s likeness to God. That nature could only be restored if amends were made for the sin. There were two conceivable ways to repair the rift: Either God could simply forgive mankind through his infinite mercy, or mankind could atone for the sin by satisfying God’s justice. The latter was impossible—fallen man was too deformed by sin to be able to atone. Thus God chose to satisfy justice and mercy himself in a single act. In mercy he took on human flesh, thus restoring human nature to its original likeness to God, and in that perfected human nature, satisfied God’s justice on the cross. Finally Beatrice recognizes another question her words have raised in the pilgrim’s mind. If the basic elements of earth, air, fire, and water were directly created by God, why do the things of the Earth, composed of these elements, decay? God directly created the elements, Beatrice explains, but they are given their form as material objects (or plants or animals) through secondary causes—things that

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are themselves created—and therefore these forms made from the elements will ultimately perish. The human soul is the direct creation of God (as she asserted in Canto 4), and hence eternal. For that matter human flesh is God’s direct creation as well (as the creation of Adam and Eve reveals), and, in light of this, Beatrice assures Dante that he may be assured of the resurrection of the body at the end of time. Canto 8 begins with a discussion of the name of the planet Venus, and the mistaken notions of the ancients who named the planet after the goddess of love whom they worshiped. The pilgrim had been unaware of his ascent but now realizes that he and Beatrice have entered the sphere of Venus because Beatrice’s enhanced beauty indicates that she has moved another step closer to the Empyrean. Immediately the travelers are surrounded by the dancing lights of the souls in this sphere, who sing “Hosanna” and perform here a dance they began in the Empyrean. These are the amorous, those who in life were devoted to carnal love before turning to caritas (spiritual love). The spokesman for this group tells the pilgrim that all of the souls want the pilgrim to share their joy and tells him that they all move with the same will as those angelic intelligences to whom he addressed his CANZONE beginning “O you whose intellect spins Heaven’s third sphere” (the second canzone in Dante’s CONVIVIO). The pilgrim asks the speaker his identity. He replies that he had known Dante on Earth, and that he would have given Dante more cause to love him for his generosity had he not died young. This is the Angevin prince CHARLES MARTEL, whom Dante had befriended but who had died suddenly in 1295 at the age of 24. He was heir to Provence and to Naples and had already been made king of Hungary before he died. He mentions that he would also have been king of Sicily had his grandfather, Charles I of Anjou, not forfeited the love of the Sicilian people and incited the rebellion of 1282, known as the Sicilian Vespers. From this cautionary example Martel predicts that his brother, ROBERT OF ANJOU KING OF NAPLES, will come to disaster if he does not curb his stinginess—a trait so different from the generosity of their father (Charles II of Anjou, king of Naples).

Martel’s comments prompt the pilgrim to ask how good seed can produce bad fruit—how sons can grow to be so inferior to their fathers. Martel answers that the heavens influence the talents of individuals in various ways, in accordance with the will of God. Thus sons will not necessarily have the same talents as their fathers. Because an ordered society requires various talents of its members in order to function smoothly, people are born with diverse aptitudes. These various gifts, distributed without regard to lineage, should work together to form a harmonious commonwealth. Individuals go astray when they are forced by circumstances into roles they were not meant to fill, as when a natural soldier is pushed into the priesthood. The poet opens Canto 9 with a direct address to Clemence (either the wife or the daughter of Charles Martel). He speaks of the wrong that will be done to Martel’s son when his brother Robert usurps the throne of Naples from him. Dante also claims that Charles revealed some things about his descendants that Dante cannot talk about, but he can only hint that those wrongs will be avenged. Now some other figures appear from among the dancing radiant souls. The first of these is CUNIZZA DA ROMANO. A notorious woman in her day, Cunizza was the sister of the infamous tyrant Ezzelino, whom she refers to as a “flaming torch” (l. 29) and whom Dante had placed among the violent in circle seven of Hell. Cunizza had been the lover of the troubadour SORDELLO (portrayed in Cantos 6–8 of the Purgatorio), for whom she had left her first husband. She is known to have had three more husbands and at least two other lovers. But she is here, presumably, because she turned from those carnal loves to true caritas late in her life. Remarkably she indicates, “I myself forgive in me / what caused my fate, it grieves me not at all” (ll. 34–35). Revealing that she can read the future in the mirrors of God’s justice—the angelic Thrones who move the sphere of Saturn—she goes on to prophesy a series of disasters for those who live in her native land, the March of Treviso, which will be torn by partisan strife. Prior to her prophecy Cunizza has generously introduced another figure from among the amorous souls whose fame, she says, should last for five centuries: This is the soul of FOLQUET DE MAR-

Paradiso SEILLE—a troubadour poet like her lover, Sordello, but one who, later in life, abandoned his carnal life and turned to the love of God. He became a Cistercian monk and eventually bishop of Toulouse. After reiterating Cunizza’s attitude that the souls here do not repent, but rather “smile instead” (l. 102), Folquet reads the pilgrim’s mind and introduces the radiant soul beside him. This is the soul of Rahab, the whore of Jericho who aided the Israelite spies in their escape from the city of Jericho before Joshua’s victory there (Joshua 2). Folquet says that Rahab was the first to ascend to this sphere, presumably having been released from Limbo on the occasion of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell. Now the Holy Land that Joshua won is being neglected by the current pope (BONIFACE VIII), who rather than recovering Jerusalem from the Muslims cares only for canon law. Folquet ends with a prophecy that Rome will soon be free of the simoniac practices of this papacy. In the course of his comments Folquet mentions that this third sphere is the last one into which the shadow of the Earth extends, implying that these amorous souls are the last in Heaven who will be touched by earthly concerns.

Commentary The address to the reader with which Dante begins his second canto is one of the most remarkable of such addresses in the entire Comedy. In it he actually warns unprepared readers to go no further, because unless they have devoted their lives to study, they will find it very difficult to follow him in these deep seas. The metaphor of his composition as a boat repeats the image he used at the beginning of the Purgatorio, but in this case his boat is a large ship whose sails must be filled by Minerva, goddess of wisdom. Maintaining the ship imagery, Dante alludes to the myth of Jason and the Argonauts and asserts that nothing the Argonauts saw on their journey into the unknown was nearly as amazing as the things Dante is about to reveal as he makes his unprecedented journey. Dante is, as he implies, the first poet to endeavor to describe Heaven itself in detail. The structure of Heaven presented in the Paradiso is based on the Ptolemaic system as conceived in Dante’s day. There are thus nine spheres revolv-

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ing around the stationary Earth. Moving outward from the Earth these are the spheres containing the seven planets—the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—encircled by the sphere of the fixed stars and finally the Primum Mobile (First Mover), beyond which is the Empyrean Heaven, the eternal abode of God. Thus as Beatrice and the pilgrim Dante shoot upward at incomprehensible speed, their first stop will be the sphere of the Moon. Although the Moon seems at first to be a luminous cloud into which he passes, the pilgrim comes to realize that it is in fact a solid orb with a smooth polished surface, and (assuming that he does indeed possess his body at this point) he is unable to comprehend how two solid objects can occupy the same space—a logical and physical impossibility on Earth. But one of the chief themes of this canto is the insufficiency of human reason. Virgil, symbol of human reason, could guide the pilgrim only to the Earthly Paradise. There the Divine Wisdom of Beatrice took over, and here the pilgrim is finding that rational assumptions about the world are insufficient for Heaven, where divine revelation must explain the mysteries of faith. The rather trivial point of the pilgrim’s absorption into the solid Moon is used here to recall the mystery of the dual nature of Christ—as light can enter water, as Dante can enter the Moon, so God can enter human flesh, and only the mystery of faith can explain why. It may seem odd to modern readers that the pilgrim Dante, whisked into the heavens by the love of God, should stop on the way to wonder why there are dark spots on the Moon, or more important why Beatrice should take up 97 lines to respond to him, including time spent refuting the pilgrim’s own wrong answer. But in fact Dante’s question leads to the consideration of the structure of the universe itself, and the distribution of God’s love throughout his creation, and so is perfectly relevant at the beginning of this third canticle. However, Beatrice’s discourse is quite complex and dense—so much so that one wonders whether Dante places it here to illustrate his warning to unprepared readers at the beginning of the canto: This is the sort of thing that readers of the Paradiso

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will have to consider—if the reader cannot follow it, he needs to turn back. Once again the discussion points out the limits of human understanding and the need for divine revelation. Dante suggests his own theory concerning the spots on the Moon, repeating the suggestion (based on the Muslim philosopher Avicenna) that he had made in Convivio 2.13.9 that the Moon varied in density and that this variety led to differences in the way the surface reflected light. Beatrice disproves this notion in two ways. If Dante’s explanation were true, she says, then either the Moon’s lighter and denser areas extended through the entire body of the Moon, or the surface of the Moon was layered so that the darker areas were deeper down and thus farther from Earth. If the first possibility were true, Beatrice says, then during an eclipse of the Sun, sunlight would show through the thinner, translucent areas of the Moon. Nor can the second option be true, Beatrice says, and illustrates with an experiment: Set three mirrors at different distances from you in a room, and let them all reflect the same light behind you. The farthest mirror, she says, may appear smaller but will reflect the light at the same intensity as the other two. From a modern scientific perspective, of course, particularly dealing with astronomical distances, Beatrice’s conclusions about the experiment are quite wrong, but for Dante and his contemporaries they held weight. Beatrice begins her own explanation of the Moon’s markings (the explanation of Divine Wisdom, which she represents) by comparing the varying brightness of the Moon with the varying brightness of the fixed stars: The cause of one must be the cause of the other, she implies. The stars are known to affect Earth, and Beatrice argues that if the variations in the stars were caused by disparities in density, then the only differences in the effects of one star or another on Earth would be differences of degree rather than of kind. All stars would have the same sort of effect, but some would have a stronger effect than others. But since the influences of stars do in fact differ in kind, then the dissimilarities in brightness must be the result of different powers, not densities. They are qualitative, not quantitative, differences.

The creative power of God (which is one and indivisible) is transmitted to the rest of the created universe, including human beings as well as the cosmic spheres, through the variety of the stars. The planets, Beatrice explains, are moved and powered by angel intelligences, as the human body is by the soul, and God’s light and the stars’ influence that shines on them are reflected back according to the nature and virtue of the object and its intelligence—according to the capacity of the angel intelligence to receive and reflect God’s creative power. A number of intelligences must inhabit the sphere of the Moon, and their varying worth affects the Moon’s varying brightness. Beatrice’s explanation, if not satisfying from a scientific perspective, is quite appropriate spiritually and allegorically. It underlines God’s power and love that knits all of creation together. More important for the remainder of the Paradiso, it sets the stage for the hierarchical arrangement of the inhabitants of Heaven. All souls Dante meets here are saved—why should some be closer to God than others? Beatrice’s discourse implies the answer: Individuals receive grace according to their own capacity. Some have a greater capacity than others, but all are happy because all are filled with blessing. The pale faces that appear before the pilgrim as Canto 3 begins seem to him to be dim reflections, but he recognizes that he has made what he calls the opposite of the error made by Narcissus: The mythological Narcissus mistook his reflection in a pond to be a real person, while the pilgrim Dante mistakes these real people to be reflections. His mistake results from his reliance on his own physical senses—something that his discussion with Beatrice about the markings on the Moon has just demonstrated is an error here in Heaven, where spiritual awareness is far more important. The Moon, long a symbol of inconstancy in that it is apparently the only changing object in the heavens, seems the appropriate abode for the souls who, on Earth, were inconstant in their vows pledged to God. Dante speaks with two nuns, both of whom were compelled to leave their cloistered lives to make political marriages against their will. Yet clearly this sphere contains, as well, the souls of

Paradiso monks or priests who may have similarly forsaken their vows, in addition to secular Christians who failed to fulfill promises made to God. In the hierarchy of the blessed these souls stand lowest, and it may seem logical for Dante to ask whether any souls in this sphere ever feel discontent with their placement here. It is possible that Dante may have in mind the shades he has recently seen in Limbo in the first circle of Hell, all of whom wish to be on the other side of Hell’s gate. But there are essentially two answers to Dante’s question. First, as Piccarda explains, each individual soul in Paradise experiences heavenly bliss according to his or her own capacity to receive it, and therefore all are content. Second, as the pilgrim will find out in the next canto, all souls in Paradise dwell in the Empyrean Heaven and partake of the divine vision. They also appear, however, in the heavenly sphere that most closely represents the quality of their earthly lives. The two women who appear here have much in common. Piccarda Donati, a kinswoman of Dante’s wife, Gemma, was the sister of Dante’s good friend Forese and his bitter political enemy, the Black leader Corso. Forese had told Dante in Canto 24 of the Purgatorio that Piccarda was already in Paradise. She had become a member of the Franciscan sisters of Saint Clare early in life, but in about 1288 her brother, Corso, broke into the sisters’ Florentine convent with an armed company and abducted Piccarda, forcing her to marry a Florentine gentleman named Rossellino della Tosa, with whom Corso desired a political alliance. Early commentators claimed that Piccarda soon grew sick and died as a result of her forced marriage. The other woman is the empress Constance, last of the line of Norman kings who conquered Sicily in the 11th century. Legend said that Constance was a nun but was forced to marry Henry VI (son of Frederick Barbarossa and second of the powerful Hohenstaufen emperors) and later gave birth to the Emperor Frederick II. Piccarda claims that Constance always had the veil in her heart—suggesting that she still lived the holy life in spite of her forced secularization. Modern historians now doubt that Constance was ever a nun and believe that Dante was simply following a popular current

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legend about the empress. But it is interesting to note that when Piccarda Donati took the veil, she adopted the name Constance. As the third canto ends, the pilgrim watches the faces of Constance and Piccarda fade away, making the face of Beatrice seem that much brighter by comparison. It is also true, however, that the closer Beatrice approaches to the Empyrean Heaven, the brighter her face becomes, as it reflects the light of God’s love in her. Canto 4 deals exclusively with the two doubts raised by the pilgrim Dante after he listens to Piccarda’s comments. Beatrice first considers the doubt raised by Plato’s Timaeus. Dante did not know the Timaeus directly but either through a Latin translation by Chalcidius or indirectly through comments by SAINT AUGUSTINE or ALBERTUS MAGNUS. Thus Dante’s understanding of the Timaeus goes beyond what Plato actually said. All souls, as Dante understands it, preexisted in the stars before being placed into human bodies, and each soul returned to its same individual star upon the body’s death. The fact that the souls of the inconstant reside in the Moon makes it appear to Dante as if Plato’s doctrine is true. This doctrine, attractive to many in the early church, was specifically declared heretical at the Council of Constantinople in 540 C.E., when it was decided that each soul was specially created by God at the birth of the individual. But the real shortcoming of Plato’s doctrine is its denial of free will—if the soul is predestined to return to the same star whence it sprang, then human choice on Earth becomes meaningless. Thus Plato’s doctrine is heretical, or poisonous as Beatrice calls it. The truth, as Beatrice explains to Dante, is that all souls in Heaven inhabit the Empyrean and experience heavenly bliss according to their own capacities. They appear in the different spheres as a symbol of their varied capacities to enjoy the infinity of God’s reward, but they enjoy his grace equally and all have their home in him. In this Dante follows the interpretation of SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS of the words of Christ in John 14.2: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” Aquinas asserts that these dwelling places or “mansions” are metaphorical degrees of bliss: “Now the heavenly kingdom is compared to a city,” he writes. “Therefore we

184 Paradiso should distinguish various mansions there according to the various degrees of beatitude” (ST 3, suppl., q. 93, a. 2). Furthermore this capacity for bliss differs according to the degree of caritas each soul is capable of: “The more one will be united to God the happier will one be. Now the measure of charity is the measure of one’s union with God. Therefore the diversity of beatitude will be according to the difference of charity” (ST 3, suppl., q. 93, a. 3). We can probably assume that this is the case in Dante as well—the farther the pilgrim ascends, the greater the charity of the souls he addresses. Dante’s other question—the justice of holding Piccarda and Constance responsible for their broken vows when they were in fact forced to leave the convent—is treated by Beatrice as a question of will. The steadfast human will cannot be coerced, according to Beatrice. It has the power to resist any force. Piccarda and Constance could have returned to the cloister. She provides two examples of the steadfast human will—following the pattern set in the Purgatorio, one example is Christian, the other classical. The first is Saint Lawrence, martyred under Valerian in 258 C.E. A deacon of Rome entrusted by Pope Sixtus II with the church’s treasury, Lawrence was arrested by a Roman prefect and ordered to hand over the treasury to him. Lawrence agreed and proceeded to send the prefect the sick and poor citizens to whom he had provided charity and told the prefect that the church had no greater treasure than these. Unamused, the authorities tortured Lawrence, finally roasting him on a grill (during which torment the saint is said to have asked to be turned over so that he could be roasted evenly on all sides). Beatrice’s other example is the ancient Roman hero Mucius (Gaius Mucius Scaevola). During a siege of Rome by the Etruscan king Porsenna of Clusium Mucius vowed to infiltrate the Etruscan army and kill the king. He failed in his assassination attempt, killing the king’s secretary by mistake. When he was captured and facing execution by burning, Mucius deliberately put his right hand into a sacrificial fire and held it there without showing any pain. Impressed by his will, Porsenna let him go, and Mucius earned his nickname Scaevola (i.e., “Lefty”).

In the rest of the canto Beatrice explains her remarks in relation to Piccarda’s comment that Constance always kept the veil in her heart. To explain, Beatrice employs the standard Scholastic distinction between the absolute will and the conditioned will. The absolute will—like that maintained by Lawrence or Mucius—always and steadfastly wills the good. The conditioned will, however, reacts to fear or violence and may choose what it perceives as a lesser evil in order to avoid a greater. Once again Thomas Aquinas (citing the authority of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics) asserts that actions performed through fear are “voluntary rather than involuntary” actions (ST 1.2, q. 6, a. 6). That Dante has Aristotle in mind here as well is clear from the example that Beatrice uses to illustrate the conditioned will: It is the example of Alcmaeon, the same one used when this question arises in Book 3 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Alcmaeon (alluded to previously in Purgatorio 12) was the son of the seer Amphiaraus, one of the Seven against Thebes. Amphiaraus had foreseen his own death at the siege of Thebes and refused to join the expedition. But his wife, Eriphyle, bribed by Polynices, persuaded him to go. Amphiaraus made his son swear to avenge him on Eriphyle if he died at Thebes, and Alcmaeon ultimately chooses to kill his mother in order to carry out his father’s command. Thus Alcmaeon’s (clearly misguided) act is one of conditioned will, as he consents to commit one wrong in order to avoid another that he sees as worse. This, Beatrice insists, is the will that prevented Constance from rejoining the convent. Dante’s near-swoon at the end of Canto 4 is also worth noting. It recalls his swoon after speaking with Francesca in Canto 5 of the Inferno (actually the fourth after the general introductory canto). The swoon here is intended to recall that earlier incident and encourage readers to see the parallels between Piccarda and Francesca: Each woman is the first contemporary figure the pilgrim meets in their respective canticles. Both women discourse upon the power of love. Francesca, who speaks of “Love, that excuses no one loved from loving” (Inferno 5, l. 103), presents amorous love as irresistibly drawing her to desire Paolo, as it compelled him to desire her. This kindled desire is in their case an

Paradiso irresistibly destructive force. Piccarda, on the other hand, describes “the virtue of our heavenly love,” which makes the souls in the sphere of the Moon “want no more / than what we have” (Paradiso 3, ll. 70–72). Divine love is not about destructive desire but about peace, contentment, and joy. As the opening of Canto 5 makes clear, Beatrice will increase in beauty and radiance as she continues to ascend toward God. Her radiance, like that of the other souls in Paradise, is the outward manifestation of her joy, the bliss that accompanies perfect love. This love and joy come, she tells the pilgrim, from her perfected vision (l. 5), that is, the understanding or intellect that shapes her will to love, directing it toward the Highest Good. And she can see that Dante himself, though mortal, already has the eternal light in his own mind. This explains the burning intellectual curiosity that inspires Dante to ask so many questions here in the heavenly realms, as he seeks that perfect understanding or vision that will lead to perfect love. It also explains the eagerness of other heavenly souls, shining with the eagerness of their joy, to help him. Beatrice’s comments regarding the possibility of one’s vows’ being commuted echo those expressed by Thomas Aquinas: And if it be decided absolutely that a particular vow is not to be observed, this is called a “dispensation” from that vow; but if some other obligation be imposed in lieu of that which was to have been observed, the vow is said to be “commuted.” Hence it is less to commute a vow than to dispense from a vow: both, however, are in the power of the Church. (ST 2.2, q. 88, a. 10)

Beatrice warns too that vows must be taken seriously, not entered into rashly without serious intent. The vow must be for a good purpose. Again Aquinas seems to be the source of Dante’s views. In the same article concerning vows Aquinas says Certain things are good, whatever be their result; such are acts of virtue, and these can be, absolutely speaking, the matter of a vow: some are evil, whatever their result may be; as those things which are sins in themselves, and these can nowise be the matter of a vow: while some, considered in themselves, are good, and as such

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may be the matter of a vow, yet they may have an evil result, in which case the vow must not be kept. (ST 2.2, q. 88, a. 2)

Aquinas adds that this was the case with Jephthah. Beatrice also cites the example of Jephthah: A Gileadite and a judge of Israel, Jephthah led his army against the Ammonites, vowing that if he were victorious in the battle, he would sacrifice the first living thing to greet him when he returned. Unfortunately, it was his own daughter who rushed to welcome him home (Judges 11.30–34). The classical example from Beatrice is another involving the rash sacrifice of a daughter. It was well known that prior to the departure of the Greek fleet for Troy Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, to the goddess Diana in order to calm the winds. Dante seems to have been following a version of the legend in which Agamemnon had promised the goddess the most beautiful thing born in his kingdom during the year. The most beautiful is, of course, his daughter, but he postpones making the sacrifice until some years later, when Diana will not allow the Greek fleet to sail until she is appeased. Canto 5 ends as Dante and Beatrice enter the sphere of Mercury, in which he will find the souls of the ambitious, or the seekers of honor. They appear hidden in their own radiance. The happiness of the soul who offers to answer the pilgrim’s questions— an act that reflects his own perfect charity—is discernible in the intensity of his own brightness, which hides him from the pilgrim’s eyes. Canto 6 is a densely allusive Canto on Roman history, or, more accurately, the progress of the eagle, symbol and standard of Rome, as delineated by the emperor Justinian I—“Caesar” on Earth, he says, but merely “Justinian” here in Heaven, where such distinctions are meaningless (l. 10). He became Caesar, he says, some 200 years after the Emperor Constantine established the new imperial capital at Constantinople in 330 C.E. This move was “against the course of heaven” (l. 2) because, first, it was a move from west to east, the reverse of the movement of the heavens. But second, it is implied, the move was contrary to the will of Heaven, since, as Justinian makes clear later, God’s

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plan was that the eagle should move west to Rome, as it did under Aeneas (“that warrior who wed Lavinia” [l. 3]), and Rome was to be the seat of his church. Justinian is chosen as the spokesperson to deliver this political vision perhaps because of his pivotal position in Roman history. His reconquest of Italy and reestablishment of an imperial presence at Ravenna would suggest a return of the eagle to its rightful home, according to the will of Heaven. His codification of Roman law had already been cited, in Canto 6 of the Purgatorio, as the bridle meant to tame the wild horse of Italy. A connection is thus established between Canto 6 of the Paradiso and Canto 6 of the Purgatorio: In the earlier canticle the poet delivered a 76-line diatribe against contemporary Italy because of its internecine warfare caused by the absence of a true emperor; here in the Paradiso Justinian delivers a canto-long history of God’s providential hand in the empire that now is spinning out of control. A full accounting of all Justinian’s allusions in this canto requires a course in Roman history. For our purposes it may be prudent to focus on four major points of the story that Justinian takes care to emphasize. Justinian begins his survey at the time of Aeneas, traveling to Italy to wed Lavinia and to unite the Trojan and Latin lines. But Justinian does not begin with a reference to Aeneas himself but rather to Pallas, son of Aeneas’s ally Evander, who was killed in Aeneas’s war with Turnus. As Ricardo Quinones points out, the heroes of Rome are the equivalent of Christian martyrs, since they are instruments of the divine plan for Roman/Christian history (164–165). After a list of such heroes Justinian arrives at the second major point of his history, the time of JULIUS CAESAR. Caesar’s career receives a disproportionate amount of attention in Justinian’s summary because it was precisely at that point that “Heaven willed / to bring the world to its own harmony” (ll. 55–56). Justinian describes Caesar’s wars in Gaul (ll. 58–60); his crossing of the Rubicon, thus initiating the civil war (ll. 61–63); his defeat of Pompey at Pharsalia and Pompey’s subsequent death at the hands of Ptolemy (ll. 64–66); his stripping Egypt from Ptolemy and giving it to Cleopatra (l. 69); and his subsequent defeats of Pompey’s ally

Juba and Pompey’s sons in Spain (ll. 70–72). These events are significant in Justinian’s history because they establish the empire and Caesar’s authority over it. They set the stage for the third major point of the eagle’s progress, at which the most important events of this long history are about to occur. These events begin under Augustus, who follows Caesar as Rome’s “succeeding chief” (l. 73). Augustus, having defeated Caesar’s murderers (BRUTUS and CASSIUS, now punished in Hell in the mouth of Satan [Inferno 34]) as well as his own rival Antony, begins a time of worldwide peace—a time at which the gates of the temple of Janus in the Roman forum are locked (l. 80). These gates were always left open during times of war as a sign that the god was out with Rome’s troops. Augustus had them closed in 27 B.C.E. (for only the third time in Roman history) as a sign of universal peace. For Dante this peace was the necessary preparation for Christ’s coming into the world. He was born under Augustus and crucified under the third Caesar, Tiberius. In this God’s will was accomplished, because the original sin of Adam was expiated through the sacrifice of Christ under Roman law. Although this “vengeance” for that sin was divinely ordained, it was still necessary to avenge Christ’s death (ll. 92–93), and therefore under Titus the Roman armies again became God’s instrument by destroying Jerusalem, thus punishing the Jews whom Dante and his contemporaries saw as culpable in the Crucifixion of Christ. The final significant point of Justinian’s story is the reign of Charlemagne (ll. 94–96). As king of the Franks Charlemagne had invaded Italy in 773 after the Lombard king Desiderus had threatened Rome and the pope himself. Although Charlemagne was not crowned Holy Roman Emperor until 800, Dante sees this action as symbolic of the necessary sacred bond between the Empire and the church. Charlemagne, bearing the standard of the eagle, is Dante’s ideal of the emperor ordained by God to hold secular power in a universal Christian commonwealth. Having finished his historical survey, Justinian contrasts Charlemagne with the “new Charles” (l. 106)—that is, Charles II of Anjou, who was king of Naples and Sicily and leader of the Guelph party

Paradiso in 1300 (the fictional date of the Comedy). Justinian proceeds to condemn contemporary Guelphs as well as Ghibellines, both of whom are acting contrary to God’s will. The Guelphs, supporting the pope and Charles as the tool of the pope and using the French fleur-de-lis as their standard, are trying to “tear / the banner [of the eagle] down” (ll. 106–107)—to bring down the Empire itself, the instrument of God’s providence. The Ghibellines (supporters of the emperor), who display the eagle standard as their own, are no better than the Guelphs because they have abandoned the concept of justice so basic to the Empire—as Justinian, codifier of Roman law, knows better than anyone. All of this Justinian has offered in answer to the pilgrim’s simple question about his identity. As for why Justinian and his fellow souls are assigned to this sphere, the former emperor answers that these souls all performed their deeds at least in part out of a desire for earthly fame. Since that desire impeded somewhat their concentration on the love of God, their capacity for bliss in Paradise is less than that of some of the other souls in the heavenly realms. Like the breakers of vows in the sphere of the Moon, however, these souls are completely happy with their position, and their contentment contributes to the overall harmony of the heavenly spheres. In Canto 3 Piccarda Donati had introduced one of the souls sharing her reward, the empress Constance. In this sphere the emperor Justinian reverses this act and introduces the commoner Romeo di Villeneuve. Romeo, as Dante presents him, is a humble pilgrim who rises to great heights in the court of Raymond Berenger IV of Provence, only to be falsely accused of misuse of funds by jealous members of the court. Romeo recalls another figure similarly unjustly maligned—PIER DELLE VIGNE in the Wood of Suicides in Inferno 13. Had Romeo despaired of his unjust treatment and ended his life, he would not have the reward he has here received. Almost certainly Dante also intends readers to see a parallel between Romeo and himself. Falsely accused of graft and condemned by the Florentine government to perpetual exile, Dante, as Romeo, ends his life as a pilgrim soul, “begging, door to door, his bread” (l. 141). Such are the consequences for those whose principles, like Romeo’s and Dante’s,

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are in line with the high ideals Justinian extols in the first part of the canto. Dante himself has the choice to react to his treatment as Pier delle Vigne had, or as Romeo had. It is clear by the time he writes this Canto which path he has chosen. Justinian sings a song to the God of hosts and then glows with what Dante characterizes as a twofold brightness that might be interpreted as suggesting both earthly and heavenly glory. Finally he and his fellow spirits engage in a dance before they fly off. This will be the first of a series of dances that the spirits will perform in God’s harmonious Heaven. Justinian has said something that bothers the pilgrim, however, and although he is too overawed by Beatrice to pose the question to her, she is again able to read his mind: How, the pilgrim wonders, could Titus’s destruction of Jerusalem have been just punishment when the Crucifixion was itself an act of justice? Her answer to this allows Beatrice to provide an account of sacred history that parallels Justinian’s previous canto on secular history. At the root of Beatrice’s explanation is the principle of Christ’s dual nature. Human beings were created sinless and immortal and with free will. In all of these ways the human soul manifests a likeness to God. But when through his own free will Adam disobeyed God, he forfeited this likeness and human nature was effectively marred. In order to atone for that original sin, Christ took on human form and with it human nature, and his Crucifixion was a just act because in adopting human nature he took upon himself the guilt of humankind, which was thereby purged when he died on the cross. However, even though their Crucifixion of Christ was a part of God’s just plan, the Jews’ motives in crucifying Christ were evil ones, and because he was also divine, the Crucifixion was a sacrilege. In that sense the Jews were culpable and subject to punishment, which was meted out justly when Titus destroyed Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Having answered the pilgrim’s initial question, Beatrice now goes on to anticipate his next difficulty: Why did God choose this particular means of expiating human sins, rather than another? Beatrice’s answer to this is essentially the argument

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presented by SAINT ANSELM OF CANTERBURY in his famous tract Cur deus homo (“Why God Became Man”). According to this argument there were two ways that human nature might be restored after original sin: Either God could, through his mercy, grant humankind a free pardon, or humans could satisfy God’s justice by making amends for their sin. But the recompense for the sin must be a penalty equivalent to the sin itself, and human beings were incapable of humbling themselves to the extent possible to atone for the outrageous sin of pride involved in Adam’s rebellion—his attempt to make himself like God, according to the serpent’s promise in Genesis 3.4–5. God ultimately chose the way of justice and mercy. He took on human nature and was crucified in order to save humankind through his own infinite mercy. In doing so, he through his act of humility countered Adam’s pride, atoning for the sin through an act of sincere love (which every atonement must be). Beatrice’s discourse has raised another question in the pilgrim’s mind: If things created directly by God are immortal (as the original human beings were), then why are all things made up of the four elements not immortal, since those elements were created by God? To answer this, Beatrice makes a distinction between direct creation and secondary creation. Specific earthly objects are formed by the basic elements and the influence of the stars. Plants and animals are among these things, and their vegetative and animal souls are formed in them by the influence of the stars. Therefore these are not immortal but corruptible, like the rest of worldly creations, except for human beings, whose souls are created directly by God and are therefore immortal. All of this, Beatrice asserts in an aside, is proof of the resurrection of the body. Because God created the bodies of Adam and Eve directly, the body will rise again on the last day. It is not clear how all human bodies will rise merely because Adam and Eve’s were made incorruptible, particularly since, as STATIUS has discussed in Canto 25 of the Purgatorio, the human body originates as the mingling of blood and therefore seems to be a secondary creation. But STATIUS’s further assertion—that the infused intellectual soul becomes the form that shapes the body (as it later shapes the aerial body of the shades

in the afterlife)—implies that Dante may see the body, too, as God’s direct individual creation. Since human nature has been restored to its original perfection by Christ, there should be nothing to hinder the body from rising to eternal life. As Canto 8 opens, Dante alludes to the pagan belief that under the influence of the planet Venus men and women could be driven mad with passionate love. Such beliefs, he goes on to say, inspired pagans to worship the planets as gods. The truth, as Dante has consistently made clear, is that the planets can only predispose people to act in a certain way. The free human will can overcome any such inclinations, as MARCO LOMBARDO has explained in Canto 16 of the Purgatorio. Thus human beings are responsible for the way they act upon the influence of Venus. If they turn that influence toward virtuous love, they will find a place in this heavenly sphere. The souls who approach Dante here are the amorous whose love has been turned to caritas. Like the other souls in Paradise, they have arrived here from the Empyrean, their true home, where they had been dancing among the Seraphim. The soul who acts as their spokesman asserts in lovers’ language that each of the souls is ready to give the pilgrim pleasure, to let him have the fullest joy (ll. 32–33). Here of course this involves answering his questions, thus increasing his understanding and therefore his love. Such a love shared, as Virgil had stressed in Purgatorio 15 (ll. 55–58), will only increase the love of all. The spokesman explains that the souls here circle in perfect harmony with the angelic intelligences, the Principalities (ll. 33–35), who move this sphere of Venus, and quotes back to the pilgrim Dante his own canzone addressed to those very angels—the first canzone of the Convivio beginning, “O you whose intellect spins Heaven’s third sphere.” The speaker, as he identifies himself, is Charles Martel, the young heir to the kingdoms of Provence (the “left bank” of l. 58), Naples (the “region of Ausonia’s [i.e., Italy’s] horn” of l. 61), and Hungary (the “land the Danube bathes” in l. 65). Charles Martel, eldest son of Charles II of Anjou and Mary of Hungary, had already been crowned king of Hungary when he visited Flor-

Paradiso ence in 1294 and was warmly entertained by the Florentines. This canto makes it clear that he had met Dante on that occasion and that the two were more than just passing acquaintances, particularly since he speaks of Dante’s once loving him greatly (l. 55). Charles Martel apparently was familiar with the poem he quotes in these lines, a poem that may have been popular during his stay in the city. He also seems to have given Dante some pledge of future patronage, since he tells the pilgrim that Dante would have witnessed “more than the first leaves of my love for you” (l. 57) if Charles had not died so soon. Cholera claimed Charles Martel in 1295 at the age of 24, but Dante uses him here as the image of an ideal ruler whose actions would have been motivated by love. His allusions to others in his family make his own virtues stand out by contrast: Sicily would still have been ruled by his descendants had not French misrule alienated the population and provoked the Sicilians to rebel in 1282, throwing off the rule of his grandfather, Charles I of Anjou. Charles Martel goes on to prophesy that his brother Robert, who would inherit the kingdom of Naples from their father Charles II in 1309, will face similar rebellion if he does not curb his own greed and that of his Catalan advisers (Robert had spent time as a hostage in Spain and had made a number of Catalan friends, whom he took to Naples with him when he inherited the throne). Robert’s stingy heart, Charles adds, had sprung from one more generous. In this Charles must not be alluding to their father, Charles II, whom HUGH CAPET mentions in Purgatorio 20 (ll. 79–81) as being particularly avaricious, but perhaps to Charles I of Anjou, their grandfather, who appears in Canto 8 of the Purgatorio among the negligent princes (ll. 112–114). In that canto a common theme among the rulers is the inadequacy of their offspring to the task of ruling. Sordello comments that “not often does the sap of virtue rise / to all the branches” (Purgatorio 7, ll. 121–122) and adds that the gift of virtue is up to God, “and we can only beg that He bestow it” (l. 123). Here in the corresponding canto of the Paradiso the question arises again, as Dante asks Charles Martel why noble fathers do not necessarily sire worthy sons.

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Charles Martel’s answer has much in common with Virgil’s explanation of the workings of Fortune in the corresponding seventh canto of the Inferno. There Virgil had claimed that God worked through the turnings of Fortune’s wheel to ensure that wealth continued to circulate among different families and nations rather than accumulating in one place. Through this divine economic policy the overall society benefited. Similarly Charles Martel asserts here that virtuous qualities cannot all be concentrated in a single family. God ensures that virtues are not simply passed down through the active male principle discussed by Statius in Purgatorio 25, but that individuals are subject to the influence of the stars (harking back to the beginning of the canto). As individuals create the variety of God’s Heaven with their differing capacities for love mentioned by Justinian (Canto 6, ll. 124–126), individuals with a variety of talents fulfill God’s plan for Earth. Since God created man to be a social being, and since society requires a wide assortment of different talents in order to function well, God (through nature in the form of stellar influence) creates individuals whose talents are diverse enough to benefit society, without regard to lineage. Thus Charles gives the example of Jacob and Esau, biblical twins who even in the womb displayed significant differences in character. In the familiar pattern of coupling a biblical example with a classical one, Charles also cites the figure of Romulus, who founded Rome but whose father was of such low birth that he could be completely forgotten, encouraging later generations to say that Romulus had been sired by the god Mars. As he ends his discourse, Charles Martel seems to allude to two of his own brothers when he argues that people should build on what nature has granted them, rather than moving into positions for which they are not suited. “Those men bent to wear the sword you twist / into the priesthood” (ll. 145–146), he says—possibly alluding to his brother, Lodovico, who became bishop of Toulouse—and he adds “you make a king / out of a man whose calling was to preach” (ll. 146–147)—probably referring to his brother Robert, king of Naples, who had composed a number of elaborate sermons.

190 Paradiso Dante begins Canto 9 with a direct address to “Clemence.” Scholars are divided as to whether this is intended to refer to Clemence of Hapsburg, Charles Martel’s widow and the daughter of the Emperor Rupert I, or to Clemence of Anjou, the daughter of Charles Martel and after 1315 the wife of King Louis X of France. Since Charles’s wife died in 1295, in the same epidemic that claimed her husband’s life, it would seem that Dante would be more likely to address the living Clemence— though his reference to “your Charles” in the first line would be an unusual phrase to use with the man’s daughter. Dante prophesies trouble for Charles’s descendants. He refers no doubt to plots against Charles’s and Clemence’s son Charles Robert, who became king of Hungary in 1308 upon the death of Otto of Bavaria, but was blocked from the throne of Naples by the machinations of his uncle, Robert the Wise, and POPE CLEMENT V. Dante’s prediction that those responsible would soon pay may allude to the deaths of Robert’s brother and nephew in the Battle of Montecatini in 1315. The pilgrim converses with two more souls in this sphere as the canto continues, and these encounters follow the pattern established by Charles Martel: The individuals speak of their own lives on Earth and then end with prophetic condemnations of contemporary political figures. The first soul he meets is Cunizza da Romano, one of the most notorious women of 13th-century Italy. The sister of the infamous tyrant Ezzelino III of Romano (whom Dante shows immersed to his eyebrows in the river of boiling blood in Canto 12 of the Inferno), Cunizza had made a political marriage in 1222 to Count Riccardo di San Bonifazio of Verona. In 1226 she fled Verona with her lover, the troubadour Sordello (whom we have seen in Cantos 6 through 9 of the Purgatorio). She went on to marry two more husbands and take at least one more lover. By 1260 when her brothers being dead, Cunizza settled in Florence, where she seems to have devoted the remainder of her life to acts of charity. In 1265 in a document composed in the house of CAVALCANTE DEI CAVALCANTI, she freed the slaves who had been owned by her father and her brothers. She wrote her will in 1279 (perhaps ill-advisedly leaving her estate

to her kinsmen Alessandro and Napoleone degli Alberti, the counts of Mangone whom Dante places in the last circle of Hell in Inferno 32), and she probably died shortly thereafter. Cunizza’s presence here may be somewhat surprising, but Dante apparently wants to present her as a woman naturally inclined to carnal love, who later redirected that inclination to the love of God. Cunizza makes the rather startling comment that she feels no remorse for her earthly sins but only feels thankful to God. Drinking from Lethe in the Earthly Paradise has not wiped away all memory of her sin, but it seems that all regrets have been washed away. Penance has already been performed, and God has forgiven Cunizza and taken her into Heaven. Gratitude is all she can feel. Like Justinian and Piccarda Donati before her, she is enjoying heavenly bliss to her own full capacity. Cunizza ends with a lengthy prophecy concerning her home territory of the March of Treviso in northeastern Italy (between Venice and the Alps). She documents a series of punishments that will befall the citizens of the March for their iniquities, beginning with the decisive defeat of the Paduan Guelphs by Dante’s patron CAN GRANDE DELLA SCALA in 1314. The Paduans’ failure to pay allegiance to the empire led to their bloody defeat at the River Bacchiglione near Vincenza in 1314. The second punishment she predicts is the assassination of Riccardo da Cammino, lord of Treviso, in 1312. Riccardo was murdered in his palace by a halfwitted servant while playing chess with Alterniero degli Azzoni. It is thought that Alterniero had planned the murder to avenge himself on Cammino for seducing his wife. The final prophecy concerns Alessandro Novello of Treviso, bishop of Feltre and a Guelph partisan. In 1314 he received a group of Ghibelline refugees from Ferrara whose failed coup attempt against Pino della Tosa forced them to ask for Alessandro’s protection. But at Pino’s request the bishop surrendered the refugees, who were all publicly executed in July. Alessandro’s deed gave him such infamy that he ultimately retired to a monastery, where he died in 1320. Cunizza reads these judgments, she says, in the minds of the Thrones, the angels of God’s judgment who move the seventh sphere, the sphere of Saturn.

Paradiso The second half of the canto is devoted to the other soul waiting to address the pilgrim—it is the troubadour poet Folquet de Marseille. Known, as was Cunizza, for his amorous affairs in youth, Folquet decided to enter a Cistercian monastery in about 1195, convincing his wife to retire to a convent at the same time with their two sons. Folquet became abbot of Torronet monastery in 1201 and bishop of Toulouse in 1205. Thus Folquet, as is Cunizza, is a figure who transcended his early amorous life to spend his later life in caritas. And as Cunizza, he tells the pilgrim in lines 103–105 that he does not repent but credits the loving influence of God, working through the spheres, with drawing him back to God. Folquet points out one more soul to the pilgrim—that of Rahab, the whore of Jericho who hid the Israelite spies who were sent into her city, thus enabling Joshua to conquer the city, the chief Israelite victory in their conquest of the Holy Land. Rahab went on to become one of the ancestors of Christ and according to Folquet was the first inhabitant of this sphere, having been rescued from Limbo during Christ’s Harrowing of Hell. But her chief function here is to give Folquet the opportunity to condemn Pope Boniface VIII: Folquet, who had taken a significant role in the Albigensian Crusade against the Catharist heretics of southern France in 1208–09, denounces the pope for ignoring demands for a new crusade. With the fall of Acre in 1291 Christians lost their last foothold in the Holy Land that Rahab had helped conquer originally. Boniface is interested only in canon law, Folquet declares, rather than the Scriptures or the church fathers. In this Dante is reiterating a charge he had made in a letter written in 1314, where he asserted that the Italian cardinals cared nothing for the church fathers but read only the decretals (collections of church law), which according to Dante dealt only with ways to obtain benefices and increase revenues. In the final lines Folquet issues a prophecy that the sacred Vatican (the place where Saint Peter is said to have been martyred) will soon be free of this “adultery”—if the church is the allegorical bride of Christ, then the pope’s lust for worldly wealth is a form of adultery. The imagery seems appropriate in this sphere of Venus. But just

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what Folquet’s prophecy alludes to is unclear. It may refer to Boniface’s impending humiliation and death. It may look forward to the coming of Henry VII or another imperial champion. It may even refer to Clement V’s removal of the papal court to Avignon, since that would cleanse the Vatican of the sin. One final important point in Canto 9 involves Folquet’s comment that this is the “sphere where the shadow of your earth / comes to an end” (ll. 118–119). According to Ptolemy and the Muslim astronomer Alfraganus, the cosmic shadow cast by the Earth forms a cone whose point extends to the third sphere. Allegorically this suggests that the souls in the sphere of Venus will be the last in Paradise still influenced by any attachment to mundane things.

CIRCLES OF SOULS—THE ACTIVE AND CONTEMPLATIVE LIVES (CANTOS 10–22) Synopsis As Canto 10 opens, Dante addresses the readers, calling on them to look up at the spheres and marvel at their perfect order, reflecting and embodying the perfection of their creator. He praises the way the circle of the ecliptic intersects the circle of the equator at precisely the correct angle to create the seasons. He invites his readers, metaphorically, to remain at the table to receive more intellectual nourishment as he moves on. The pilgrim suddenly finds himself in the sphere of the Sun, once again unaware of having risen to that height. Here Dante, protesting that the beauty of this realm is inexpressible, sees a family of souls whose radiance outshines the Sun itself. When Beatrice advises him to thank God for the grace that has taken him to this sphere, the pilgrim focuses his love so thoroughly on God that, for the first time, he remarks that “Beatrice, eclipsed, had left my mind” (l. 60). Singing a hymn whose beauty is unknown on Earth, the bright lights of this realm form a dancing circle around the pilgrim and his guide. When the lights pause in their dance, one of them addresses the pilgrim, saying that the love that has allowed Dante to climb to this height impels the spirits to quench the thirst for knowledge that is the pilgrim’s unexpressed wish.

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Indeed what the pilgrim wishes to know are the identities of the souls that encircle him. These are 12 doctors of the church—influential theologians known for the wisdom and learning expressed in their writing. The speaker identifies himself as Saint Thomas Aquinas, the most influential of 13th-century Scholastic philosophers. To his right is his own teacher, the German Dominican Albertus Magnus, famous for his commentaries on Aristotle and his scientific treatises. Beside him is the soul of Gratian, the Benedictine monk who in the mid-12th century published the Decretum, the first interpretation of the entire body of canon law. Next is Peter Lombard, who taught theology at the University of Paris and wrote the chief textbook for the study of theology, the Sententiarum libri quatuor, a compilation of “sentences” or sayings of the church fathers. Beside him is King Solomon, believed to be the author of the biblical wisdom books of Proverbs and Wisdom. Next is DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE, a first-century Athenian mistakenly thought to be the author of the fifth-century treatise on angels called The Celestial Hierarchy, among other texts. The soul beside Dionysius is never named; most commentators believe him to be the fifth-century Spanish priest Paulus Orosius, whose Seven Books of History against the Pagans was written specifically to counter charges that civilization had deteriorated since the advent of Christianity. This work served as an inspiration and a source for Saint Augustine’s magnum opus, The City of God. To the right of Orosius is ANICIUS MANLIUS SEVERINUS BOETHIUS, sixth-century author of the widely influential Consolation of Philosophy. By him is the soul of the Spanish bishop Isidore of Seville, the early seventh-century author of the encyclopedic Etymologiae. Isidore is followed by the Venerable Bede, the English monk and author of the eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Beside the English Bede is the Scottish Richard of Saint Victor, an Augustinian monk and mystical theologian who was author of the 12th-century treatise De contemplatione. The final soul in the ring of lights belongs to SIGER OF BRABANT, a contemporary of Aquinas and fellow philosophy instructor at the University of Paris. Siger, a follower of the Muslim philoso-

pher Averroës, was the great adversary of Aquinas, and many of Siger’s arguments were condemned as heretical. Yet he dances beside Aquinas in this ring of souls. With the introduction of this last soul the ring of spirits begins to turn again, and the lights resume their music unknown on Earth. Dante compares their movement and song to a clock tower that calls the faithful to the celebration of matins, the service that anticipates the rising of the sun. Dante begins Canto 11 with a four-tercet aside in which he muses upon all the striving involved in worldly pursuits and the waste of time it all seems from his vantage point in Heaven with his glorious Beatrice. The circle of souls ends its dance, and Aquinas speaks again. Reading the pilgrim’s thoughts, the saint sees that two comments in his previous discourse have puzzled the pilgrim: The first is his comment that SAINT DOMINIC led his followers on a road “where all may fatten if they do not stray” (Canto 10, l. 96). The second is the remark that after Solomon “there never arose a second with such a vision” (Canto 10, l. 114). He will clarify the second point in Canto 13; here Aquinas discusses the first. According to Thomas Aquinas Divine Providence sent two princes to help guide the church, the Bride of Christ. One (Saint Francis) was remarkable for his love, like the angelic Seraphim. The other (Saint Dominic) excelled in wisdom, as did the Cherubim. Aquinas says he will speak of only one, since to praise one of these great mendicant founders is to praise both, and he (a Dominican) chooses to relate the life of Saint Francis. He narrates the biography as if it were the love story of Francis and the personified Lady Poverty. While still a youth in Assisi Francis angered his father by marrying this lady, whom no one else would have. She had been without a lover since the death of her first spouse (Christ) 1,100 years before. Aquinas relates how Francis’s first converts embraced poverty to follow him, how the popes Innocent III and Honorius III gave their blessings to the new order, how Francis preached unsuccessfully before the sultan of Egypt, and how he returned to Italy, where he received the stigmata—the wounds of

Paradiso    193 Christ. Two years later he died in the lap of his beloved Poverty, commending her to his disciples and requesting that they love her faithfully. Aquinas now returns to the pilgrim’s question, implying the unity of the mendicant orders by suggesting that as Francis’s fellow, Dominic must be equally admirable. But the rule laid down by Dominic is no longer followed by the friars of Dante’s time. Returning to the metaphor of the Dominicans as sheep, Aquinas says that many are greedy for a richer food than Dominic allowed and wander off. Only a few remain close to their shepherd— that is, adhere to Dominic’s rule—but these are so few that it would take very little cloth to produce their cowls. When Aquinas finishes his speech the 12 wise souls begin to circle again around the pilgrim and Beatrice. Almost immediately a second circle forms around the first, made up of 12 more scholars. Both wheels now begin to move in perfect harmony, a sight Dante compares to a double rainbow. From within the second ring of souls another spirit speaks. This time it is Saint Bonaventure, the leading Franciscan of the later 13th century. As the Dominican Aquinas had delivered a stirring eulogy of Bonaventure’s master Francis, so Bonaventure, echoing Aquinas’s assertion that God had sent the church two guides, takes the opportunity to eulogize Saint Thomas’s master, Dominic. In a narrative that follows the pattern Aquinas used, Bonaventure speaks of Dominic’s life as a war story, with the saint as Christ’s great champion. Bonaventure describes Dominic’s birth in the Castilian village of Caleruega, claiming that Dominic’s intellect was so great that in the womb he caused his mother to have prophetic dreams. Bonaventure goes on to relate Dominic’s marriage to faith at his baptism, his godmother’s dreams of his glorious future, and the spirit from Heaven who decreed that his name would declare that he belonged to the Lord. Bonaventure traces Dominic’s career, describing his request to the pope for the right to fight heresy (specifically the heresy of the Albigensians in southern France) and his subsequent career as God’s soldier against them. Having finished his story, Bonaventure proceeds to attack the degeneracy of his own Franciscan

order (as Aquinas had with the Dominicans). He refers to Matthew of Acquasparta (who as general of the order in 1287 relaxed the Franciscan rule, inviting subsequent abuses) and to Ubertino of Casal (leader of the Spiritualist Franciscans, who wanted a more radically literal reading of the rule), lamenting the way they had divided the order. Bonaventure now names himself, declaring that when he was general of the order, his concerns were not with temporal things. He then names the other souls in his circle. The first pair are two of Francis’s early followers, Illuminato (who accompanied Francis on the Fifth Crusade) and Augustine of Assisi, said to have died the same day and hour as Francis himself. Next is the learned theologian and mystic Hugh of Saint Victor (two of whose students—Richard of Saint Victor and Peter Lombard—are in the first circle). Petrus Comestor

The Sun—Glorified Souls, from Canto 12 of the Paradiso, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

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(an early chancellor of the University of Paris) and Peter of Spain (who became Pope John XXI) are next in the circle (Peter is the only “modern” pope whom Dante puts in Heaven), followed by Nathan, the Old Testament prophet who chastised King David for his affair with Bathsheba. Next Bonaventure names Saint John Chrysostom, the fourth-century patriarch of Constantinople, and Saint Anselm, 11th-century archbishop of Canterbury, often considered the first of the Scholastics (Beatrice had used Anselm’s arguments in Canto 7 when she explained the necessity for Christ’s sacrifice). Anselm is followed by Donatus, fourth-century Roman grammarian, and Rabanus, the learned ninth-century archbishop of Mainz. Finally just to the left of Bonaventure himself is JOACHIM OF FIORE, the radical Cistercian whose prophecy of an “Age of the Spirit” was adopted by the Spiritualist Franciscans and opposed by Bonaventure. Bonaventure ends the canto saying that it was Aquinas’s speech that prompted him to recount the story of Dominic, God’s own knight. As Canto 13 opens, Dante addresses his readers, asking that they visualize the brightest constellations of the heavens revolving in synchronized movements in order to have some notion of what the pilgrim witnessed as the spirits danced around him. After singing a hymn in praise of the Trinity, the 24 circling radiances fall silent, and the spirit of Thomas Aquinas speaks again. Aquinas now purposes to answer the second question that he had read in the pilgrim’s mind back in Canto 11 (l. 26)—the question of how it can be said of King Solomon that “there never arose a second with such vision” (Canto 10, ll. 114). Aquinas sees that the pilgrim believes that it was to Adam and Christ himself that God imparted the greatest portion of wisdom. Aquinas begins his lengthy explanation by making use of the Neoplatonic idea of the great chain of being: The living light of God flows into creation, is reflected through the nine spheres, and is infused into earthly beings and objects, each of which embodies the light to its own capacity. In this Aquinas echoes Beatrice’s discourse on the Moon spots in Canto 2, as well as Charles Martel’s discussion of individual differences in Canto 8. But Aquinas goes on to say that God’s

original light is diminished as it moves through the spheres, and anything created indirectly by nature cannot be as perfect as that which proceeds directly from God. Of humans only Adam and Christ were created with no intermediary, and therefore the pilgrim is correct in assuming that these two were without peer. Solomon, says Thomas, was the wisest of kings, not of all men. Solomon had not asked for a grasp of syllogistic logic or esoteric metaphysical knowledge of the sort speculated on by many of Aquinas’s fellow Scholastics (to “know whether necesse / with a conditioned premise yields necesse,” or to be able to “count angels here,” for example, in ll. 98–99). Solomon had asked God for the understanding to govern his people (1 Kings 3.9), and that is what he received. Aquinas’s distinction between the wisest king and wisest man leads him to a more general warning that one must be careful to make clear distinctions before making judgments. Such hasty conclusions can lead into grave errors, and Aquinas lists several classical philosophers and early Christian heretics who made such mistakes—mistakes that, because of their pride, they refused to admit. In his final words Aquinas goes further, cautioning against judging other people as damned or saved. We cannot presume to know the mind of God or see what God sees; thus it may well be that the person we see as a thief will in fact be saved by God, and the one we see performing acts of charity will in fact be damned. In Canto 14 once Aquinas has ended his discourse, Beatrice once again reads the pilgrim’s thoughts and expresses his question before it has even formed in his mind: Will these souls remain as bright as they are now for all eternity, even after they are reunited with their resurrected bodies? And if so, how will their fleshly eyes be able to cope with the intensity of the light? The rings of souls dance with renewed delight and thrice sing a hymn to the Trinity as they anticipate satisfying the pilgrim’s thirst for knowledge. This time it is Solomon, the brightest of the spirits, who speaks. Their brilliance will indeed last eternally, he says. The degree of their brightness reflects the degree of their love, and their love

Paradiso    195 is directly proportional to their vision or knowledge. The extent of their vision, finally, depends upon the grace bestowed on them. When they are reunited with their bodies, they will in fact be more perfect beings. The resurrection will increase their portion of grace, which will enhance their vision, and that in turn will magnify their love. As that happens, they will grow even brighter. Indeed the bodies that lay beneath the ground will surpass the effulgence of these souls as the inner glow of a coal surpasses the white ash of its outer flame. And the eyes and other organs of the resurrected body will be perfected as well, becoming strong enough to bear any brightness. At that both rings of souls cry “Amen,” so eager are they to be reunited with their bodies. Now Dante is aware of a third ring of souls, encircling the other two and increasing their brilliance, overcoming his sight. He looks on Beatrice, and her smile enables him to raise his eyes once more, until he realizes he has been transported again to the fifth sphere, the glowing red sphere of Mars. The pilgrim offers a silent prayer of thanks, and when he has finished he witnesses two great beams of light forming a cross in the sky. In his memory Dante says he sees the image of Christ on that cross but cannot find the words to describe the sight. He sees countless bright lights within the beams that form the cross, like dust specks moving in a sunbeam. The souls are all joined in singing a hymn of praise in which the pilgrim recognizes only the words arise and conquer. Overwhelmed, the pilgrim believes he has never felt such bliss—but then remembers that he has not yet looked into the eyes of Beatrice, who must be even more beautiful now that they have ascended to a higher sphere. As Canto 15 opens, the blessed souls in the cross end their song and eagerly await the opportunity to help the pilgrim—the virtuous love they share, Dante says, always ends in generosity, just as the misdirected love of transient things always ends in evil (as Virgil had outlined in Canto 17 of the Purgatorio). Suddenly Dante sees a single soul move like a shooting star from the right arm of the cross down to its foot. Dante compares this soul’s eagerness to address him with that of Anchises when he met his son, Aeneas, in Hades in Virgil’s epic,

The Cross, from Canto 14 of the Paradiso, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

and, echoing Anchises, the spirit greets Dante as sanguis meus or “blood of mine” (Aeneid 6.835). The spirit continues in Latin to exclaim, “O grace of God. To whom, as to thee, was heaven’s gate ever twice opened?” (ll. 28–30). In words beyond human understanding the spirit continues, finally concluding with thanks to the Trinity for showing such great favor to his descendant. For this soul is that of Cacciaguida, Dante’s great-great-grandfather. He says he knows the pilgrim understands that souls in Heaven can read his thoughts by seeing them mirrored in the mind of God, and therefore the pilgrim does not speak his desires. But out of love for his offspring Cacciaguida asks to hear the pilgrim’s own voice ask what he wants to know. Encouraged by Beatrice’s smile, the pilgrim asks the spirit’s name. Cacciaguida introduces himself as the father of Dante’s great-grandfather, Alighiero, after whom the family took its

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name. He mentions in passing that Alighiero has been on the first terrace of Purgatory for more than a century and is in need of the pilgrim’s prayers. Cacciaguida goes on to describe the Florence of his own day, the early 12th century. It was a much simpler place, where the citizens dressed in leather and did not build grandiose, showy homes. Women were not married too young, and dowries were not too large. Wives did not paint their faces, and their husbands did not leave them to go off trading in France. Dante’s contemporaries—such as the reputedly immoral woman Cianghella and the corrupt justice Lapo Salterello—would have astounded the people of ancient Florence as much as the noble Romans Cincinnatus and Cornelia would amaze the citizens of Dante’s modern city. Into that simpler and more virtuous city Cacciaguida was born and was christened at Dante’s beloved Baptistry of San Giovanni. He married a woman of the Alighieri clan and later followed Emperor Conrad in the Second Crusade. It was Conrad who knighted him on the battlefield, Cacciaguida says. His death in the crusade was counted a martyrdom, and so Cacciaguida arose directly to this fifth sphere. As his speech ends, he chastises contemporary popes for failing to mount a new crusade to recapture the Holy Land. As Canto 16 opens, Dante says he now can understand why people on earth take pride in their lineage, since even in Heaven itself he was moved to feel such pride. But he adds that a noble lineage is only valuable if members of the bloodline continue to act in a noble manner. Out of respect the pilgrim addresses his ancestor with the Italian formal “you” (voi) and begs him to give a more specific account of his family and of the Florence of his day. The radiance of Cacciaguida burns brighter with joy as he begins to speak. His birth, he says, occurred when the planet Mars had returned 580 times to the constellation Leo after the moment of Christ’s incarnation (i.e., about 1091). His family house, he says, was located in the section of Florence called the Porto San Piero. Cacciaguida refuses to boast of his own forebears. The Florence of his day was about one-fifth the size of Dante’s city, he says. This was before the purity of the original

Florentine population was polluted, as Cacciaguida puts it, by refugees from surrounding towns like Campi, Certaldo, Fighine, Galluzzo, and Trespiano. In particular he cites Baldo d’Aguglione (guilty of fraud in public office) and Fazio de’ Morubaldini of Signa (who worked with Pope Clement V to oppose Emperor Henry VII) as members of these immigrant families who have corrupted the city. The clash between the papacy and the emperor was responsible, Cacciaguida implies, for the immigration of the Cerchi family from Acone (l. 65) and the Buondelmonti from Valdigreve (l. 66)— two leading families in recent Florentine political controversies. Cacciaguida blames this “mixed blood” for the decay of many great cities of the past and says it promises to be Florence’s ruin as well. A number of the old noble families (the Ughi, the Bostichi, the Ravignani) are already extinct by Dante’s day. Other great families are in decline, and many have been corrupted by their own pride. Finally Cacciaguida laments particularly the entry to Florence of the Buondelmonti clan, recalling the tragedy that ensued when Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti broke his engagement to a daughter of the Amidei clan, resulting in his murder and the bloody Guelph-Ghibelline warfare in the city. This kind of civil war was unheard of in Cacciaguida’s day. After Cacciaguida’s speech the pilgrim is eager to ask another question and is encouraged to do so by Beatrice. Although she and Cacciaguida already know his desire, she urges the pilgrim to express it, knowing that he will need to return to communicate with the world. At this the pilgrim recalls to Cacciaguida all of the dark prophecies he has heard about his own future from the various souls in Hell and Purgatory (CIACCO, FARINATA, BRUNETTO LATINI, VANNI FUCCI, CORRADO MALASPINA, ODERISI OF GUBBIO). He wishes to hear Cacciaguida, who can see directly into the mind of God, clarify these prophecies, so that he can return to his life forewarned. At this Cacciaguida begins to relate the details of Dante’s banishment, this time in clear words rather than the enigmatic language of prophecy. First he assures the pilgrim that the foreknowledge he attains from God in no way predestines events

Paradiso to happen as they do. Dante will be forced to flee from Florence, Cacciaguida says, through the machinations of Boniface VIII, the simoniac pope. The pilgrim will be forced to leave behind what he loves the most and will learn what exile is like, but he will be most disturbed by the company of those around him—the other white Guelphs from whom Dante broke in 1304, becoming what Cacciaguida calls “a party of your own” (l. 69). Cacciaguida tells Dante that his first patron will be the great Lombard whose arms display an eagle upon a ladder. This is thought to be Bartolommeo della Scala of Verona. With Bartolommeo Dante will meet the young man destined for “great renown” (l. 78), that is, Bartolommeo’s brother, Can Grande, who will be generous and valiant, but whose deeds the pilgrim is warned not to reveal yet to the world (since Can Grande, at the fictional date of the Comedy, was only nine years old). Cacciaguida ends by admonishing the pilgrim not to envy his Florentine neighbors, since his fame will far outlive their infamy. The pilgrim, grateful that Cacciaguida has warned him of the future, still expresses his fear that if he writes the things he has learned on his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in his poetry, he will offend powerful people. Yet if he fails to write these truths, he worries that he will not achieve fame. Cacciaguida, glowing more brightly than ever, agrees that some readers— those whose deeds have been shameful—will dislike what Dante has to say. This should not deter him, however, from telling the whole truth. While his words may seem offensive at first, ultimately they will benefit humankind and earn him honor. It is for this reason, Cacciaguida tells him, that the pilgrim has chiefly met only famous persons in his journey through the afterlife, because readers can be moved more readily by the examples of illustrious men and women. Canto 18 opens with Cacciaguida contemplating his own words and the pilgrim pondering the joy as well as the pain that await him in the future. Beatrice breaks into the pilgrim’s thoughts to comfort him, reminding him that God will ultimately assuage the wrongs done to him. Looking at her, the pilgrim sees eternal joy and love in her face,

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and his heart feels no other longing. Finally Beatrice directs the pilgrim to listen again to his ancestor, noting that Paradise is not only in her eyes. Cacciaguida now proceeds to point out to the pilgrim all of the most renowned warriors of God included among the souls making up the cross, and as he mentions them, each one flashes like lightning within the arms of the cross. The biblical figures of Joshua and JUDAS MACCABEUS are named first as the most prominent figures. Then Cacciaguida points out the Emperor Charlemagne and his nephew, Roland, and Count William of Orange and his friend, the converted Muslim giant Renouard, all four of whom were heroic figures of the Old French epics. Cacciaguida rounds out his list with two more recent historical crusaders—GODFREY DE BOUILLON, who led the First Crusade (1096), and the Norman warrior ROBERT GUISCARD, who captured southern Italy from the Saracens in the late 11th century. Now Cacciaguida returns to his position in the right arm of the cross, and the spirits all resume their heavenly song. When the pilgrim looks back at Beatrice, he sees that she has grown even more beautiful and thereby understands that the two of them have soared again into the next sphere. The silvery light of Jupiter replaces the red glow of Mars, and here the glowing lights of myriad souls begin to form brilliant letters, one by one. They form themselves into a D, then an I, then an L, until they have succeeded in spelling out the words Diligite iustitiam qui judicatis terram (“Love justice, you who judge the earth”)—the opening verse of the Vulgate book of the Wisdom of Solomon—for this is the sphere of the Just Rulers. When the spirits have formed the final M in brilliant gold against the silver backdrop of Jupiter, other bright souls begin to descend to the M, all singing a hymn of praise. The additional souls first reshape the M into the form of a lily (the symbol of Florence and of the French monarchy) and then, finally, into the shape of a great eagle (the symbol of the empire). The sight of this symbol of divine justice inspires Dante to utter a new invective against the corrupt papacy, and the clergy “who buy and sell within the temple” (l. 122), who, by implication, are like the

198    Paradiso moneychangers whom Jesus drove from the sanctuary in Matthew 21.12–13. The poet addresses the souls of this sphere, asking them to pray for those on earth misled by the simoniac priests, and then, in a bold apostrophe addressed to the reigning pope at the time he was writing (John XXII), Dante condemns the use of excommunication as a means of obtaining church revenue and depicts the pope answering that he recognizes John the Baptist (whose image appeared on the gold florins that he loves), but not Peter or Paul. The souls of this sphere shine like rubies as they form the imperial eagle, and as Canto 19 opens, the pilgrim sees the beak of the eagle move and speak with one voice for the countless souls comprising it. The virtue of their justice has taken them to this sphere, the eagle says, and left a reputation for integrity on earth that people are content to praise but not to follow.

The Eagle, from Canto 19 of the Paradiso, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

Addressing the eagle, the pilgrim begs for the answer to a question that has bothered him for some time. Reading his mind, the eagle does not acknowledge the question but begins by alluding to God’s creation of the universe and the inability of any of his creatures to understand the divine intellect. Thus the truth of God’s justice is concealed from the pilgrim, who would ask where the justice is in damning eternally the virtuous man who has never heard of Christ or been baptized. Indignantly the eagle asks the pilgrim who he thinks he is, trying to pass judgment on matters he does not understand. Chastising thick-headed men in general, the eagle proclaims that the divine will is perfectly good, and only what accords with it can be called just. Now the eagle takes flight and soars above the pilgrim, singing a lofty hymn incomprehensible to the pilgrim’s ears. Returning to its original position, it explains that the judgment of God is as far beyond man’s knowledge as the eagle’s hymn is beyond the pilgrim’s understanding. Souls enter this realm only if they had faith in Christ—either before or after his Crucifixion—the eagle says. But the bird goes on to insist that there are some who call the name of Christ who will not be saved on Judgment Day. In particular the eagle condemns the unjust rulers of several European nations, including Albert of Austria, Philip the Fair of France, the English and Scottish kings, Ferdinand IV of Spain, Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia, Charles II of Naples, Frederick II of Sicily, Haakon V of Norway, and Andrew III of Hungary. Navarre may be happy if it escapes French rule, the eagle says, pointing to the recent sorrows of two Cyprian cities—Nocosia and Famagosta—who suffer under the rule of the Frenchman Henry II of Lusignan. When the great eagle stops speaking, all of the individual lights that make up its form begin to sing in harmony the words of a heavenly hymn. When they have finished, the eagle speaks once again in a single voice. It tells the pilgrim to focus on its eye, for the souls making up that part of its anatomy are the worthiest in this sphere. The soul forming the pupil of its eye, the eagle reveals, is King David, whose bliss corresponds to

Paradiso    199 the value of the psalms he composed. Five more glorious souls make up the eagle’s eyebrow. The first of these, closest to the eagle’s beak, is the Roman emperor Trajan (who had been represented as an example of humility on the terrace of pride in Purgatory, Canto 10). Beside Trajan is the soul of the Old Testament king Hezekiah, who showed such pure repentance on his deathbed that God granted him 15 more years to live (2 Kings 20.1–11). The soul at the midpoint of the eyebrow is the emperor Constantine, who moved the imperial seat to Constantinople and, according to tradition, left Rome under the authority of the pope. While the eagle emphasizes Constantine’s “good intentions,” it asserts that those intentions “bore the worst of fruits” (l. 57), since that “Donation of Constantine” has resulted in what Dante saw as the usurpation of secular power by the popes, whose concerns should have been spiritual. The next figure is the 12th-century King William II of Sicily, known as “the Good,” whose just rule is contrasted with that of the current occupants of the thrones of Naples and Sicily—Charles II of Anjou and Frederick III of Aragon. Finally the eagle points out the last radiant soul of its eyebrow—that of the Trojan prince Ripheus. Naming Ripheus as one who was killed during the Greek siege of the city, Virgil called Ripheus the most just of all the Trojans (Aeneid 2.426–427). The frustrated pilgrim (who has just asked the eagle about the fate of virtuous pagans in Canto 19) cannot contain himself when he sees the two pagans—Trajan and Ripheus—and bursts out with “How can this be?” (l. 82). The eagle explains that God (in his mercy) actually wills his judgment to be assailed by human love and hope so that it may be overturned. Trajan, the eagle explains, was in Limbo until the fervent hope and prayer of Gregory the Great allowed him to return to life. The revived Trajan lived long enough to recognize the truth of the Christian faith and to be baptized. That, according to the eagle, is why Trajan is here. As for Ripheus the eagle relates that his love of righteousness was so great that 1,000 years before Christ God granted Ripheus a vision of the Christ to come and baptized him with the virtues of faith,

Beatrice, from Canto 21 of the Paradiso, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

hope, and charity. The eagle ends by extolling God’s predestination of elect souls, the list of whom is unknown even to souls in bliss. As the eagle speaks, the souls of Trajan and Ripheus twinkle in harmony. Canto 21 opens with the pilgrim’s eyes fixed once more on Beatrice’s face, but this time she does not smile. Having risen now to the sphere of Saturn, she tells the pilgrim that if she were to smile now her dazzling beauty would consume him like a bolt of lightning. As he looks away from her face into this seventh sphere, he sees a great golden ladder mounting beyond the limits of his vision, and on the ladder countless radiant souls. One soul, perched with the crowd on the ladder’s rung nearest the pilgrim, begins to shine brightly with love, but the pilgrim hesitates to speak to this radiance because Beatrice has not yet given him a sign.

200    Paradiso Having obtained Beatrice’s permission, the pilgrim now respectfully asks the radiant soul why he is the one who has gone to this point on the ladder to speak with the pilgrim and asks as well why he hears no music in this sphere, in contrast with all the others he has visited. The luminous spirit answers that the pilgrim’s ears, like his eyes, are mortal, and thus they could not bear the music of this sphere any more than his eyes could bear Beatrice’s smile here. As for why he has arrived to greet the pilgrim, the spokesman says that it was in order to serve God, who has assigned him this task. Now the pilgrim poses another question that has been troubling him: Why exactly was this soul and no other predestined for this task? The soul, whirling around its inner luminescence, responds to the pilgrim that his love enables him to look directly into the face of God and from it to derive perfect joy. But he adds that even the highest of the Sera-

Saturn, from Canto 21 of the Paradiso, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

phim, who see God most directly, cannot fathom the nature of predestination. The soul then charges the pilgrim, upon his return to earth, to tell the rest of humanity not to presume to probe the question of predestination, when even the most blessed of souls cannot penetrate this mystery. At this the pilgrim deferentially drops his question and only asks humbly the identity of the speaking radiance. The soul names himself as Saint Peter Damian, a well-known ascetic contemplative of the 11th century who rose to the rank of abbot and later cardinal in the church. He contrasts his own deliberately austere life with the gluttony and luxury of contemporary prelates with their large retinues. As he pronounces his judgment on these priests, the other souls in this sphere encircle Peter and raise a tremendous shout like thunder, expressing their approval of his words. Stunned by the loud shout in the previous canto, the pilgrim turns in fear to his guide, who comforts him as a protective mother as Canto 22 opens. Beatrice reassures him that he is in Heaven, and that all actions here are righteous. Had he been able to understand the prayer contained in the shout he has just heard, he would realize that God’s righteous vengeance would soon fall upon the corrupt clergy, and that this would happen in Dante’s own lifetime. Now at Beatrice’s urging the pilgrim turns his attention to the other souls in this sphere, shaped like hundreds of radiant globes. The largest and brightest of these approaches the pilgrim and in answer to his unexpressed question introduces himself as Saint Benedict of Nursia (founder of Western monasticism). Benedict gives a brief account of the founding of his famous monastery on Monte Cassino, which he built on the site of the former temple of Apollo and from which he introduced Christianity to the people of that region of Italy between Naples and Rome. The saint also introduces to the pilgrim the souls of Macarius (probably Saint Macarius the Younger, fourth-century founder of Eastern monasticism) and Romuald (10th-century founder of the Camaldoli, or reformed Benedictines). The pilgrim, emboldened by the love Benedict has shown him, asks the saint whether it would be possible to see his face without the veil of

Paradiso light that hides it. The saint answers that this will become possible when the pilgrim reaches the Empyrean Heaven, the place of perfection where all wishes are fulfilled. Saint Benedict then refers once more to the golden ladder of contemplation, identifying it with the ladder of Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28 and declaring that it leads directly to that glorious height. But now, says Benedict, monks have ceased to follow his rule (and thereby climb the contemplative ladder) and are consumed by greed. Benedict sees the same kind of corruption infecting priests and friars (the followers of Peter and Francis in ll. 88–90). Still, however, scripture describes far greater miracles than would be needed to reform God’s church, and Benedict ends on that note of hope. With that Benedict rejoins his company of glowing spirits, and they all are swept up into the heavens. On a sign from Beatrice the pilgrim joins her and the two of them scale the golden ladder more quickly than one pulls his finger from a flame. Now in the sphere of the fixed stars the pilgrim enters into the constellation Gemini—Dante’s birth sign. So that his mind will be completely focused on his approach to the highest blessedness, Beatrice tells the pilgrim to look down to see how far he has come. He sees all seven planets below him and, farthest down, the paltry globe of the Earth, which he calls “the puny threshing-ground that drives / us mad” (ll. 151–152). Smiling at the insignificance of the world, the pilgrim now turns his own eyes away from it to focus on the beauty of Beatrice’s eyes. Commentary As the 10th cantos of the Inferno and Purgatorio do, Canto 10 of the Paradiso marks a new beginning: In the Inferno Dante and Virgil left Upper Hell behind and passed into the city of Dis. In the Purgatorio the pilgrim moved through the gate separating the Ante-Purgatory from Purgatory proper. Here Dante and Beatrice have ascended beyond the shadow of the Earth, beyond the lower spheres wherein the spirits were characterized by some quality that kept them in that earthly shadow, with less capacity to experience heavenly bliss. Now entering the sphere of the Sun Dante is in the presence of the greatest heavenly light.

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Pausing before beginning this new direction, Dante marks the new beginning with a prelude in praise of the perfection of God’s glorious created universe. As with the gate of Hell in Canto 3 of the Inferno, creation is seen as the act of the triune God. In the first tercet the “ineffable first One” (l. 3) is God the Father, who “look[s] upon His Son” (l. 1) (who is obviously Christ) with the “love / which each of them breathes forth eternally” (ll. 1–2)—the love being the Holy Spirit. The reader is invited to look up in line 7 to observe the perfection of that cosmos, demonstrated particularly by the way in which the wheel of the ecliptic (that is, the zodiac) intersects the wheel of the equator at an oblique angle: If the two were parallel, or if the angle of their intersection were more perpendicular, then the seasons would not occur in the manner that they do, and hence there would be no period of rebirth or regeneration. As he enters the sphere of the Sun, the pilgrim notes that the souls of the wise who inhabit this sphere shine brighter than the Sun itself. He then directs his love toward God so fully that, as he says, Beatrice is eclipsed here in the Sun’s sphere. But unlike her reaction in Canto 30 of the Purgatorio, where she chastised the pilgrim harshly for his unfaithfulness to her after her death, Beatrice here approves of the pilgrim’s shifted focus, since this time it is on the Highest Good. This brief scene foreshadows the pilgrim’s ultimate need to move beyond Beatrice when the time comes for him to experience the unity of God directly in the Empyrean Heaven. Here in the heaven of the Sun, however, Beatrice in her allegorical function as Divine Wisdom takes a central role, and the ring that the souls of the wise make around her and Dante is partly intended as a crown or garland for her (ll. 91–93). The circle, of course, also evokes the wheels of the ecliptic and equator at the beginning of the canto, the 12 figures on the circle recalling the signs of the zodiac and the perfect circle they make reflecting the perfection of God’s universe—a perfection that the wisdom of these philosophers has helped to make manifest. It is difficult to make out any particular pattern among the figures named by Aquinas in the circle

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of the wise. They range chronologically from King Solomon of the 10th century B.C.E. through Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and Siger of Brabant from the late 13th century C.E. They are thus figures demonstrating God’s gift of wisdom throughout salvation history. Nearly all of the figures—Solomon, Dionysius, Boethius, Isidore, Bede, Peter Lombard, Gratian, Richard of Saint Victor—are thinkers whom Aquinas quotes in his Summa theologica, the chief source of Dante’s theological ideas. Siger of Brabant was the chief advocate of Averroism at the University of Paris during Aquinas’s tenure there, and Aquinas does cite Averroës several times in his Summa, so perhaps Siger is here partly as a stand-in for Averroës, whom Dante of necessity had placed in Limbo. Paulus Orosius was a disciple of Augustine—who, notably, is absent from this circle (perhaps so that Dante may introduce him in a more notable position in Canto 32). Perhaps Orosius represents the Augustinian contribution. As for Albert although Aquinas never cites him by name, as his teacher Albert had an influence on his thinking that pervades the Summa theologica. Thus Aquinas introduces a garland of thinkers who influenced his own thought—and whose opinions, it might be said, he introduced to readers of his own text (such as Dante himself). As he often does, Dante seems to present the figures here in pairs, one member of which parallels or complements the other. Saint Thomas (known as the “Angelic Doctor”) and Albert (called the “Universal Doctor”) are largely responsible for making the complete philosophy of Aristotle available in Christendom, Albert through his summaries and commentaries and Aquinas through his Summa, both intended to reconcile Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy. Gratian, originator of the science of canon law, compiled the canons of church councils, decretals of popes, and opinions of the church fathers into what became the basis for the study of canon law—a study that, in the previous canto, Dante had condemned the current church hierarchy for misusing. Gratian is paired with his 12th-century contemporary Peter Lombard, whose Sentences were a compilation of theological opinions of the church fathers on God, creation, salvation, and the sacraments—a compi-

lation that became the basis of Scholastic Inquiry, and did for matters of doctrine what Gratian had done for matters of law. Solomon, an Old Testament figure, is paired with the New Testament figure of Dionysius the Areopagite, mentioned as a convert of Saint Paul in Acts 17.34. Dante will allude to Dionysius in Canto 28, adopting the hierarchy of angels posited in De caelesti hierarchia, the fifth-century treatise attributed to him. As for Boethius his influence has already been seen in the discussion of Fortune in Canto 7 of the Inferno, as well as in discussions of free will versus predestination throughout the Comedy. His pairing with Orosius is curious, but it may be that Dante saw both as bulwarks against heresy—Boethius was an orthodox Christian martyred by the Arian Theodoric the Ostrogoth, while Orosius had attended a council in Palestine in 415 where he condemned Pelagianism. Or it may simply be that Orosius and Boethius lived relatively contemporaneously. Chronological proximity may be the reason for the pairing of Isidore and Bede as well, though the two figures are also remarkable for their breadth of knowledge, Isidore for his encyclopedia of all scientific knowledge of his age, Bede for his variety of writings on history, theology, rhetoric, and science. The final pair of sages, Richard of Saint Victor and Siger of Brabant, might be seen as opposites in their basic contributions. Richard, known as the “great Contemplator,” was the most famous of the 12th-century mystics and a good friend of Saint Bernard, who will be the pilgrim’s final guide in the Empyrean Heaven. His treatise De contemplatione discussed the ecstasy of love that might be attained through the contemplation of God. Siger, on the other hand, was the chief proponent of purely rational Aristotelian philosophy, following the Arab philosopher Averroës, who in following Aristotle to his logical conclusions argued that there was no individual immortality. A contemporary of Aquinas, Siger had been publicly refuted by Aquinas in 1266, then condemned and proclaimed a heretic in 1277. Having fled to Rome to appeal to the pope, Siger was assassinated while in papal custody by a demented cleric. Enemies in life, Siger and Aquinas dance beside one another in the circle of the wise, reconciled by

Paradiso the love of God, which supersedes worldly arguments. Still Siger’s presence here is puzzling. As a heretic he would be expected to be with Farinata in Canto 10 of the Inferno. One might expect at least to find him with Manfred and the excommunicates in Canto 3 of the Purgatorio. Yet here he is, in the Heaven of the Sun with the greatest orthodox theologians. Perhaps Aquinas’s comment that Siger demonstrated “invidiously logical” propositions (l. 138) provides one clue to his salvation: Siger’s logical demonstrations raised envy or even hatred but also inspired Aquinas and others more carefully and rationally to define their own positions; thus as a gadfly Siger did God’s will. Further Dante seems to have identified with Siger as a fellow figure who was forced to flee into exile because of his unpopular stance. In any case Siger was seeking the truth of the universe as God had created it, and here his bliss includes the final knowledge of what he was seeking—including the clear demonstration that he was wrong about the immortality of the soul. Solomon is another figure who might be a surprise to some. Augustine and other theologians had expressed doubts as to whether Solomon was saved. Certainly according to the Scriptures he was led astray into idolatry late in his reign by his many foreign wives (1 Kings 11). Yet Dante places him here and has Aquinas say of him that “there never arose a second with such vision” (l. 114)—a comment that he will qualify later but that justifies Solomon’s presence here. Two other points in Canto 10 are worth commenting on. In line 87 Aquinas addresses the pilgrim as one who, though alive, must have received special grace to ascend this far, from where “none descends except to mount again”—this seems a clear pronouncement that the pilgrim is destined for salvation. As such it reiterates what Beatrice told him in the Earthly Paradise: “You shall be with me—and without end” (Purgatorio 32, l. 101). Second in introducing himself, the Dominican Aquinas takes a moment in this canto briefly to warn his fellow Dominicans (he will warn them at greater length in the following canto). Saint Dominic, he says in line 96, has provided his flock a rule “where all may fatten if they do not stray”— that is, they have sufficient food for the spirit in

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following his rule, but those who wander from it will forfeit that nourishment. Aquinas will go on in Canto 11 to attack at length the present degeneracy of his order. Dante begins Canto 11 with an unusual apostrophe to the human race, using the first three tercets to scorn virtually all worldly endeavors—whether “theft” or the “affairs of state” (l. 7), “priesthood” (l. 5) or “pleasures of the flesh” (l. 8). In the fourth tercet he contrasts these with the pilgrim’s glorious welcome in the sphere of the Sun, beyond the “vanities” of such mundane endeavors (l. 10). The canto’s opening effectively leads into Aquinas’s discussion of the life of Saint Francis, characterized by devotion to poverty and the rejection of any striving for worldly gain. Aquinas, like other blessed souls can see the pilgrim’s thoughts by reading them in the mind of God and therefore knows of Dante’s confusion over what he has said of King Solomon and what he has said about the sheep who “may fatten if they do not stray” (Canto 10, l. 96). In preparing to answer the second question, Aquinas begins by introducing the founders of the two great mendicant orders of the Middle Ages, Saint Francis and Saint Dominic. Demonstrating that in Heaven all souls are in harmony, Aquinas unites the two sometimes rival orders in his discussion. Using the metaphor of the church as the Bride of Christ, Aquinas says that Divine Providence had provided two guides to keep the bride faithful to her Groom. One was Saint Francis, who is chiefly distinguished by his love (which Aquinas indicates is characteristic of the Seraphim, the highest order of angels and the closest to God, purportedly because of their more ardent love), while Dominic is known for his wisdom (characteristic of the Cherubim). The historical Aquinas makes this distinction: Cherubim is interpreted fulness of knowledge, while Seraphim means those who are on fire, or who set on fire. Consequently Cherubim is derived from knowledge; . . . but Seraphim is derived from the heat of charity. (ST 1, q. 63, a. 7)

Because Francis and Dominic worked for the same end—the advancement and purification of the church—Aquinas says that to praise one is to praise

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both and delivers an admiring biography of Saint Francis (the Franciscan Bonaventure will devote a similar eulogy to Saint Dominic in Canto 12). A difficult passage is lines 49–54: Here Aquinas metaphorically calls Francis himself a sun, a beacon of light like the other figures in this sphere, but also one whose coming ushered in a new dawn for the church. Appropriately he is from the city of Ascesi (Dante’s spelling of Assisi), a word that means “I have risen.” But an even more appropriate name for Francis’s birthplace, Aquinas says, would be Orient, the point from which the Sun rises, since his birth was a dawning for the world. Aquinas treats Francis’s devotion to poverty as a love story and dates the marriage of Francis and Poverty from the moment in 1207 when the saint gave up his inheritance in the presence of his father and the bishop of Assisi. None had been inspired to marry Poverty since her last suitor—Christ—had died, despite the example of Amyclas. This rather obscure allusion is to Lucan’s Pharsalia (5.515– 531), where the fisherman Amyclas lies unperturbed on a bed of seaweed when Julius Caesar goes to his door to ask for passage across the Adriatic. Because Amyclas was so poor, he had nothing to fear from Caesar because there was nothing that could be taken from him. Thus his poverty gave him peace of mind. Aquinas mentions that Popes Innocent III and Honorius III both sanctioned the Franciscan order. In fact Innocent had given it provisional verbal approval in 1210 because he considered the rule too strict. Honorius officially approved the Franciscans in 1223, though before the end of the century the original rule was revised. Aquinas also mentions Francis as preaching to the sultan of Egypt. In fact Francis and some of his followers had accompanied the Fifth Crusade in 1219. Once in Egypt risking his life, Francis found his way to the camp of the sultan al-Malik al-Kámil. He was courteously received and tried unsuccessfully to convert the sultan, who listened politely but remained unmoved even by Francis’s offer to walk through the fire to show his faith. Finally Aquinas describes Francis on Mount Alvernia in 1224 receiving the stigmata, the marks that he bore until his death at Porziuncola near Perugia in 1226.

After this long preamble Aquinas finally answers the pilgrim’s question. Having dwelled on the ideal of Franciscan poverty, Aquinas condemns his own Dominican order for their worldliness. The sheep (i.e., friars) could grow spiritually fat by living according to the Dominican rule—but they are lured away by greed for worldly goods and honors and fail to observe their principles strictly. Aquinas chides them for this as the canto closes, just as Dante had chided human beings in general for the same failing in the opening of the canto. Canto 12 is intended to mirror in a very precise fashion the structure and content of Canto 11, just as the second circle of the sapient souls in this canto mirrors the first circle and moves in perfect harmony with it. Saint Bonaventure, the most famous and influential of Franciscan theologians, mirrors Saint Thomas Aquinas, the most learned of Dominican theologians. In fact Bonaventure was the author of a famous biography of Saint Francis that was probably one of Dante’s sources for Thomas’s eulogy of Francis in Canto 11. As the Dominicans such as Aquinas and Albertus Magnus of the inner circle were known for their learning, the Franciscans like Bonaventure—also the author of the mystical Itinerarium mentis in Deum (“Itinerary of the mind to God”)—were known for their love. Thus in these circles understanding (the first circle) precedes love (the second circle), which is its reflection. In this Dante reemphasizes what Beatrice had told the pilgrim in the opening of Canto 5—that her radiance is the manifestation of her love, which becomes more perfect as her understanding increases. This is the opinion of the historical Aquinas: Good is the cause of love, as being its object. But good is not the object of the appetite, except as apprehended. And therefore love demands some apprehension of the good that is loved. . . . Contemplation of spiritual beauty or goodness is the beginning of spiritual love. Accordingly knowledge is the cause of love for the same reason as good is, which can be loved only if known. (ST 1.2, q. 27, a. 2)

Bonaventure’s biography of Dominic parallels Thomas’s life of Francis nearly line for line.

Paradiso As Thomas called Francis’s birthplace the perfect Orient (Canto 11, ll. 51–54) from which rose a new sun, Bonaventure describes Dominic’s birthplace in Spain as the extreme western shore, from which Zephyrus, the west wind, carries spring to all of Europe (as Dominic’s life means a springlike rebirth) (Canto 12, ll. 43–45). As Francis wed Poverty (11, ll. 61–63), so Dominic is seen as wedding himself to the Faith (12, ll. 61–64). Bonaventure’s eulogy describes Dominic’s early life in ways that stress his great intellect—so powerful that from the womb he inspires his mother’s prophetic dream that she would give birth to a dog that was to set the world on fire. His godmother dreams that he is born with a star on his forehead that illuminates the entire world (ll. 64–66). This prophecy, regarding his brilliant intellect, is fulfilled through the study that makes him a “mighty theologian” (l. 85), probably alluding to his 10 years of study at the University of Palencia. Lines 91–96 are difficult: Here Bonaventure asserts that Dominic went to the pope, not to request a profitable church appointment, or the right to pay to the poor only a third or a half of what was due to them and keep the rest for himself (as other petitioners commonly asked), but rather for leave to combat heresy (“the sinful world” of l. 94). With the pope’s blessing, and armed with his will and intellect, Dominic rushed off to attack heresy where it was “toughest” (l. 101)—that is, among the Albigensians of Provence, where he went to preach in 1205. He preached and apparently at times fought against the heretics for a dozen years, ultimately asking for papal permission to found an order of preaching friars, chiefly with the goal of converting the heretics. The order received final papal approval in 1216—though by that time the Albigensian Crusade had spent seven years wiping out the heretics. In the end alluding to both the harmonious circles of the blessed here in the sphere of the Sun and the chariot representing the Church Militant in Purgatorio 29, Bonaventure calls Dominic and Francis the wheels on the chariot of the church (ll. 106–111). Beginning in line 112 Bonaventure once more parallels Aquinas in denouncing the members of his own order for their degeneracy. Bonaven-

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ture chiefly laments the Franciscans’ division over the rule of their order. He mentions Matteo d’Acquasparta, who had relaxed the discipline in 1287 and thereby eased the way for abuses to occur, as well as Ubertino da Casale, leader of the Spiritualist Franciscans, who were so radical in their strict interpretation of the rule that their views were ultimately condemned as heretical. Bonaventure condemns both sides. Finally as Thomas had in Canto 10, Bonaventure introduces himself and his fellow spirits making up the second circle of the wise. Bonaventure names himself first and then proceeds to list his companions in the second ring. As in the first ring Dante has here created certain pairs of figures: Illuminato and Augustine—the two early Franciscans—form the first pair; Hugh of Saint Victor and Peter Comestor were 12th-century contemporaries; Donatus and Rabanus were early Christian scholars; John Chrysostom, who lost his position as patriarch of Constantinople for criticizing the empress Eudoxia, parallels Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, who had to flee England after wrangling with the king, William Rufus, over ecclesiastical jurisdiction. But in addition to the internal pairs within this second ring Dante also uses these figures as mirrors of the souls in the first ring. Aside from Bonaventure’s obvious parallel to Thomas, there are a number of other corresponding pairs. The prophet Nathan, who challenged King David over his affair with Bathsheba and complicity in the death of her husband, Uriah (2 Samuel 12), clearly parallels the first circle’s King Solomon—the product of that adulterous union. The Greek patriarch Saint John Chrysostom is probably intended to parallel the Greek Dionysius the Areopagite from the first ring. Perhaps the mystic Hugh of Saint Victor is intended to parallel his student, the later mystic Richard of Saint Victor, while the eighth-century Bede may parallel the ninth-century Rabanus, both of whom were probably the most learned figures of their times. Donatus, author of the standard grammar textbook in the schools, may parallel Boethius, who authored the standard music textbook. There could also be an intended correspondence between Orosius, famous for his history of the early church,

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and Peter Comestor, whose famous Historia scholastica outlines the salvation history of the Old Testament. Most important Dante includes the figure of Joachim of Fiore, who parallels Siger of Brabant in the first circle. Just as Aquinas and his rival Siger stand beside one another in the harmonious Heaven of the Sun, so Bonaventure stands next to Joachim—like Siger, a figure of questionable orthodoxy. Joachim (1132–1202) was a Cistercian whose apocryphal mystical prophesies included the doctrine of the “Everlasting Gospel,” which held that the dispensation of the Father (from the time of Moses to the time of Christ) and the dispensation of the Son (history since the time of Christ) were to be followed by the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, to begin in the year 1260—the year when he anticipated the defeat of Antichrist. Joachim prophesied that monks like him would ultimately defeat Antichrist, thereby ushering in a time of peace and freedom when there would no longer be any need for the discipline of institutions, and all would live in a utopia of contemplation. Although “Joachism” was condemned at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and again by Pope Alexander IV in 1256, the Spiritualist Franciscans adopted Joachim’s doctrine, which was vigorously opposed by the general of the Franciscan order—Bonaventure himself. But like the controversial Siger, Joachim is accorded a place here among the blessed, and in the mystery of divine caritas that supersedes worldly debate, Bonaventure and Joachim are reconciled in the circle of love. Dante’s exhortation to the reader to imagine 24 stars of Heaven arrayed in concentric circles opens Canto 13. His reference to the 15 brightest stars alludes to the Ptolemaic dictum that there were precisely 15 stars of the first magnitude in the sky. To these the reader is to add the seven stars of the “Wain,” the medieval name for Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper. The final two stars are to be the “Horn”—the two brightest stars of Ursa Minor, or the Little Dipper (including the North Star, which Dante calls the “axis for the Primum Mobile” in l. 12). Ultimately however it is beyond the mind’s capacity to imagine the display as the pilgrim witnessed it, since the event exceeds human

understanding as far as the speed of the Primum Mobile (conceived to be the fastest movement in the universe) exceeds the movement of the Chiana River—in Dante’s time a Tuscan stream that in many places was almost completely stagnant. The most difficult aspect of this canto concerns Aquinas’s response to the pilgrim’s difficulty with his previous comment about the wisdom of Solomon. Here with the careful precision of a Scholastic philosopher Aquinas builds a detailed argument as to why Adam and the incarnate Jesus Christ were the wisest human beings who ever lived, but Solomon was the wisest of kings. Aquinas relates first how the entire created universe is a reflection of God’s divine Idea (which is in essence the Word, or the Son). God the Father contemplates the Word, and through the love of the Holy Spirit, that Idea is reflected through the nine orders of angels who turn the heavenly spheres. The infinite light of the Creator is thus passed through the spheres and into the mundane world of matter, where it ultimately creates all transient things, both animate and inanimate. This indirect creative activity is the force of Nature, which impresses the divine Idea onto prime matter like a seal in wax (ll. 66–69). Individual people, animals, plants, or minerals are variously created according to the imperfect disposition of Nature (the “seal”) and the individual material substance (the “wax”), so that no creature is the perfect copy of the divine Idea that has been diminished by reflection through so many degrees of creation. Thus Nature is like an artist who may have in mind the ideal form she wants to create but whose trembling hand is unable to execute that ideal form perfectly. Only Adam and Christ, created directly by God without the intermediary of Nature, were perfect creations, and hence perfect in wisdom. In this way Aquinas is able to concede that the pilgrim was correct in his assumption that Solomon’s wisdom did not approach Adam’s or Christ’s but still defend his previous contention that “there never arose a second with such vision” (Canto 10, l. 114). Solomon was a product of Nature in the usual sense and “arose” from the rest of humanity to become a king. It is as a king that Solomon was unsurpassed in wisdom—specifically in wisdom

Paradiso related to governing, and not related to metaphysics, dialectic, geometry, or any other field without direct practical application to the sphere of government. Having thus explained his statement through carefully distinguishing the terms and categories he used, Aquinas warns the pilgrim—and the rest of mankind—not to jump to hasty conclusions (as the pilgrim had in response to Aquinas’s evaluation of Solomon). Making quick judgments without careful distinctions can lead to error. Aquinas first lists three philosophers who reached foolish conclusions through such hasty judgments: Parmenides and his follower Melissus—advocates of the Eleatic philosophy that held that all things came from and returned to the sun—and Bryson, a mathematician who attempted to square the circle. These three are refuted and disparaged by Aristotle in the Organon. Aquinas follows these with examples of two heretics who reached foolish conclusions based on such overhasty reasoning: Sabellius, advocate of the Monarchian heresy (which held that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were not separate persons but different terms for the one God), and Arius, founder of the Arian heresy (which held that the Son was not of the same substance as the Father, was a created Being, and hence inferior to the Father). If such famous scholars could err, Aquinas warns the average person not to be quick to judge. No one on earth can know the inscrutable ways of providence, Aquinas warns, and thus none of us should presume to know God’s judgment of any individual. We cannot presume to know that the thief will be damned or the generous man saved. Only God can judge the fate of souls. Behind this admonition is certainly the debate about the fate of Solomon’s soul alluded to in the 10th canto. It may, in addition, allude to figures like Siger of Brabant and Joachim of Fiore in the previous cantos. No one, Aquinas argues, should presume to know God’s judgment. The chief concern of Canto 14—the resurrection of the body—parallels that of the approximately equivalent canto of the Inferno: In Canto 13 of that first canticle Dante and Virgil are in the Wood of the Suicides and learn that the ultimate

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punishment of the suicides, trapped for eternity in the forms of trees, is to reclaim their resurrected bodies but “never again to wear them” (l. 104). Instead as Pier delle Vigne tells the pilgrim, “our bodies shall hang forever more, / each one on a thorn of its own alien shade” (ll. 107–108). Here in Heaven the souls anticipate with ecstatic joy the soul’s reunion with the body, an act that will complete and perfect them. When Beatrice expresses Dante’s yet-unformed question as to whether the souls’ brilliance will continue at this level after they are reunited with their bodies, and, if so, how the bodily eyes can endure such dazzling intensity, appropriately it is Solomon who answers. As the presumed author of the “Song of Songs” Solomon created what the Middle Ages interpreted as an allegory of the union of the divine and the human—or, Singleton points out, the soul and the body (3, 243). Solomon’s explanation of the radiance of the souls is an expansion of what Beatrice has already told the pilgrim at the beginning of Canto 5: The brightness of the soul is a reflection of the intensity of its love. The love’s strength depends upon the degree of the soul’s understanding. And that understanding is determined by the grace God bestows on each individual. The reunification of soul and body on the Day of Judgment will move these souls closer to perfection. At this point the reader should recall Virgil’s assertion at the end of Canto 6 of the Inferno: There the pilgrim had asked whether the tormented souls would feel the same pain after Judgment Day, and Virgil had answered by citing Aristotle, saying “the closer a thing comes to its perfection, / more keen will be its pleasure or its pain” (ll. 107–108). As the souls in Heaven are completed and perfected, their pleasure will be made more perfect. Part of that perfect pleasure will be the reunification, in bodily form, with loved ones (spouses, parents, children), and the ability to enjoy perfect bliss with them. The resurrection bodies thus confer even more grace on the blessed souls, and that increased grace will strengthen the souls’ understanding and hence their love. Therefore they will glow even brighter at that time. But the perfected eyes of the resurrection body will be strong enough to bear any brightness. This question, quaint as it may seem to

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modern readers, was much debated among Scholastic philosophers, and here (as in most things) Dante is in agreement with Thomas Aquinas, who concluded that “though the clarity of a glorified body surpasses the clarity of the sun, it does not by its nature disturb the sight but soothes it” (ST 3, suppl., q. 85, a. 2). Scholars disagree as to just who the souls are who form the third circle that takes shape around the other two when Solomon has finished speaking. Perhaps it is a group of lesser philosophers and theologians. Perhaps it is all the remaining souls in this sphere. But the symbolism of the circle is more important than the precise identification of its constituents. In line 76 Dante addresses the radiant souls making up this ring as “sparks of truth that are the Holy Spirit!” Of course any group of three in the Comedy suggests the Trinity on at least one level, and Dante here invites us to associate the first two rings with the Father and the Son. Further the three rings and the three persons of the Trinity are also associated with the threefold process that Solomon has outlined for the beatified souls in this sphere: Grace is from the Father, vision or understanding from the Son (the divine Idea or Logos of Canto 13), and love from the Holy Spirit. Now the pilgrim rises with Beatrice to the fifth sphere, which he recognizes as the sphere of Mars by its red glow. Mars is the sphere of Christian warriors, the front line of the Church Militant. The cross formed by the beams of light and the image of the crucified Christ briefly recall, obviously, Christ’s own conquest of death, and the words arise and conquer—which the pilgrim recognizes from the hymn the spirits sing—are borrowed from the Easter liturgy of the church. But the words and the cross are equally appropriate as representations of the crusaders—who bore the cross as their coat of arms—and other blessed warriors populating this sphere. With Canto 15 Beatrice and the pilgrim have reached the fifth sphere, midpoint of the nine heavenly spheres. At the same time Dante is approaching the three central cantos of the Paradiso, and as he has shown in the previous canticles, the central cantos are points of high significance. It is Dante’s martyred ancestor Cacciaguida whose voice will

dominate these cantos. A knight of the Second Crusade, Cacciaguida is honored here among the warriors of God. He greets the pilgrim in Latin (the only soul in the Comedy to do so) with words that allude to Anchises’ meeting with his son, Aeneas, in Virgil’s Aeneid. Just as Anchises showed Aeneas his destined future as ancestor of the Roman nation, so Cacciaguida will reveal to the pilgrim his coming exile and his destiny as poet of the Comedy. Also in his Latin greeting Cacciaguida cries to the pilgrim, “To whom, as to thee, was heaven’s gate twice opened?” Thus Cacciaguida indirectly shows the pilgrim that his salvation is assured—he will indeed enter Heaven a second time. Of course, like the other souls in Heaven, Cacciaguida knows what the pilgrim wishes to ask, but he wants the pleasure of hearing his descendant speak. This may explain the extraordinarily lofty style Dante uses in the five tercets in which he asks Cacciaguida’s identity. This speech is difficult to follow: First Dante describes God as the “First Equality” (l. 74) because, in his perfection, the qualities of intellect and love (so important throughout the Paradiso) are perfectly balanced. In addressing the souls of this sphere, the pilgrim says that this same balance appears in each of them as well, since in contemplating the deity, they have become like him in this way. Because their intellect is perfectly attuned to their desire, these souls can desire nothing that their intelligence cannot achieve. As a mortal man, however, the pilgrim declares it is not so with him (ll. 79–81). Thus although his heart feels deep gratitude for Cacciaguida’s welcome to this sphere, his mind is incapable of finding words sufficient to express that gratitude. He ends by asking the spirit’s identity. So circumspect is Cacciaguida in his answer that he does not reveal his name until line 135. He does disclose that he is the father of Dante’s greatgrandfather, Alighiero, who he reveals is languishing on the terrace of pride in Purgatory. The precise nature of Alighiero’s offense is left unexplained, but readers will remember the pilgrim’s own acknowledgment that he fears that first ledge in particular (Purgatorio 13, ll. 136–138). It appears that Dante may have considered the members of his family to be particularly susceptible to the vice of pride.

Paradiso The remainder of Cacciaguida’s answer takes the form of a comparison between the simple Florence of his own time and the corrupt commercial giant of Dante’s day. Florence in the early 12th century was a small town whose inhabitants had not given way to luxury. They dressed in a simple unadorned manner, and their homes were small and modest. Their daughters were not married off while still children, and their fathers were not burdened by huge dowries. The immodest behavior of Sardanapalus (the last Assyrian king, notorious for his sexual promiscuity and his effeminacy) had not yet infected the city. Husbands would not leave their wives for long periods while they went off to trade in France, and wives could be certain of their final resting place, since they would not be sent into exile with their husbands as a result of the political squabbling of Dante’s times. The noble Florentine citizens of Cacciaguida’s day—he mentions Bellincion Berti (of the ancient Ravignani family), the Nerli (who had been knighted by the marquis Hugh of Brandenburg), and the Vecchio (a noble Guelph family exiled after the Battle of Montaperti)—lived simple, frugal, and hard-working lives. Cacciaguida ends his invective by alluding to two of the more notorious citizens of contemporary Florence (l. 128): Cianghella, a woman whose loose morals, profligate behavior, and arrogance were notorious (she was known for beating her servants with a stick), and Lapo Salterello, a lawyer and judge infamous for taking bribes (he was banished from Florence in the same decree that exiled Dante). These figures, Cacciaguida says, would have amazed the citizens of his own Florence as much as Cincinnatus and Cornelia would astound the citizens of the contemporary city. Cincinnatus was the Roman leader who left his plow to lead the Roman Republic against the Aequians in 458 B.C.E. and, having defeated them, returned to his farm; Cornelia (whom Dante has mentioned among the shades in Limbo) was the daughter of Scipio Africanus and mother of the tribunes Tiberius and Gaius, known as the Gracchi, who were assassinated while striving to preserve the republic. These figures personify the virtues of republican Rome, which Dante seems to have attributed as well to the Florence of Cacciaguida’s day.

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Finally Cacciaguida reveals his name and his service in the disastrous Second Crusade, led by King Louis VII of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III. Knighted by Conrad on the battlefield, Cacciaguida died in battle with the Saracens in about 1147. A crusader’s death in battle was considered a martyrdom and therefore guaranteed Cacciaguida’s immediate ascension to this sphere. Because of his own dedication to regaining the Holy Land, Cacciaguida chides the current leadership of the church—“your Shepherds sin” he says (l. 144)—for allowing the infidel Saracens to usurp the rights of Christians to occupy Palestine. Modern readers find little of interest in Canto 16, since its specific references to some 30 medieval Florentine families seem intended to appeal exclusively to Dante’s contemporary readers. The overall themes of the canto, however, are important for the Comedy as a whole, and therefore it is worthwhile to puzzle out its main points. In particular the canto recalls the pilgrim’s meeting with the noble Florentine sodomites in Canto 16 of the Inferno, who ask him to “tell us if courtesy and valor dwell / within our city as they used to do, / or have they both been banished from the place?” (ll. 67–69). It also relates closely to Canto 16 of the Purgatorio, in which Marco Lombardo laments the degeneracy of contemporary society through misrule, as the church attempts to usurp the true role of the Emperor. Cacciaguida deals with both of these themes in his discourse. Dante begins the Canto with his declaration of pride in his noble lineage, a sentiment that seems to contrast with his attitude as hitherto represented: In Canto 11 of the Purgatorio, for instance, Guiglielmo Aldobrandesco had admitted, “My ancient lineage, the gallant deeds / of my forebears had made me arrogant,” and therefore he was doing penance on the terrace of pride (ll. 61–62). In the third canzone of the Convivio Dante had denigrated the concept of nobility of blood and extolled nobility of character. And here, too, he acknowledges that nobility of lineage disappears if new members of the line are not equally noble. Still the pilgrim glories in his blood (l. 6) here in the fifth sphere of Heaven. Of course it may be noted that the pilgrim is still in his mortal form and (as he told Cacciaguida in

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the previous canto) cannot be expected to have become perfect in heavenly love, as the spirits he addresses have. Further the remainder of the canto is designed particularly to undercut the presumptions of family pride. The pilgrim’s pride is emphasized by his use of the formal pronoun voi to address Cacciaguida. Previously he has used this term of respect with Beatrice, with Farinata and Cavalcante (Inferno 10), with Corrado Malaspina (Purgatorio 8) and Pope Adrian (Purgatorio 19), and with his poetic progenitor GUIDO GUINIZELLI (Purgatorio 26). Most important he had also used the form with Brunetto Latini in Canto 15 of the Inferno. As was Guinizelli, Brunetto was for Dante a father figure, one who taught him “how man makes himself eternal” through seeking fame on earth (Inferno 15, l. 85). But the pilgrim has learned that man cannot make himself immortal—only God can do that. He must transcend Brunetto, consign him to Hell, and embrace the true father, Cacciaguida, whose immortality resulted from martyrdom in the cause of God’s love. In the middle cantos of the Paradiso the pilgrim Dante ends his search for the father as he finds Cacciaguida, who transcends all previous father figures, including Brunetto, Guinizelli, and Virgil—and from whom he will learn the truth of his future and his poetic mission. Dante first undercuts the pilgrim’s family pride by comparing Beatrice’s knowing smile with the cough of Dame de Malehault in the romance of Lancelot du Lac (the book that led Francesca and Paulo into sin as reported in Canto 5 of the Inferno). When the lady Malehault overheard Guinevere first declaring her adulterous love to Lancelot, she coughed to warn Guinevere that she knew of the lovers’ secret. Here Beatrice’s smile warns Dante that by his use of the pronoun voi she recognizes his inappropriate pride in his ancestor. To follow the somewhat sprawling content of the rest of the canto, it is best to keep in mind the pilgrim’s request of Cacciaguida. He wants to know four things (ll. 22–27): Who were Cacciaguida’s own forebears? When did Cacciaguida live? How large was the Florence of his day? And who were the citizens worthiest to hold office at the time? Cacciaguida answers the second question first and does so in an indirect way that emphasizes his

astrological connection with the planet Mars and the constellation Leo, both of which underscore his warrior status. The calculation of 580 revolutions of Mars times 687 days per revolution, divided by 365 days in a year, yields 1,091 years since Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary, and thus the year of Cacciaguida’s birth. He was born in a house at the beginning of the “last ward” (l. 41) reached during Florence’s annual horse race on the feast day of the city’s patron saint John the Baptist (June 24)—that is, in the quarter of the old city known as Porto San Piero, and specifically in the house belonging to the ancient Elisei family. Thus scholars have speculated that Cacciaguida was a member of that family, particularly since one of his brothers was called Eliseo. But most important Cacciaguida tells the pilgrim that their ancestors’ names are “better left unsaid than boasted of” (l. 45), mildly chastising the pilgrim for his earlier pride. As for the size of Florence Cacciaguida says that his city was one-fifth the size of Florence in 1300. Population estimates for Dante’s city range from 30,000 to as high as 70,000, which suggests that Cacciaguida’s city may have been anywhere from 6,000 to 14,000, probably at the lower end of that range. The number able to bear arms, which Cacciaguida uses as his measure, would have included men between 18 and 60 years of age, perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 from Cacciaguida’s city. The final 100 lines of the canto are devoted to Cacciaguida’s answer to the pilgrim’s last question. In considering the “worthiness” of citizens, he first finds it necessary to bewail the influx of “foreign” citizens whose numbers have swelled the original pure Florentine population. These newcomers have introduced trouble and strife to the once unified and peaceful city. One of the main causes of this state of affairs are the corrupt Italian churchmen, “the world’s most despicable” (l. 58), who have “played a stepmother’s role to Caesar” (l. 59)—that is, they have feuded with the emperor. This feud has caused the decline of several towns and cities and the uprooting of families and drawn a number of displaced immigrants into Florence. Among the most regrettable of these refugees are the Cerchi family, who emigrated from the small town of

Paradiso Acone (l. 65). Originally of low class the Cerchi eventually bought the houses once belonging to the powerful Ravagnani family (ll. 94–97) and subsequently began a feud with the Donati clan that eventually was to divide Florence into the Black and White factions, respectively, supporters of the Donati and Cerchi families. Cacciaguida also deeply regrets the immigration of the Buondelmonti family. Once owners of a castle in the valley south of Florence called Valdigreve (l. 66), the Buondelmonti moved into the city when their castle was demolished in 1135. It was one of this Guelph family, Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, who abandoned a daughter of the Amidei clan (“The house that was the source of all your tears” in l. 136) on their wedding day in favor of a daughter of the Donati. To avenge this insult, the Amidei and their allies from the Lamberti clan (the family symbolized by “those balls of gold” in l. 110) assassinated Buondelmonti at the foot of the statue of Mars on Easter morning in 1215—an act that precipitated the bloody Guelph-Ghibelline feud. No wonder Cacciaguida says it would have been better if the Ema—a stream flowing between Florence and the Buondelmonti’s castle in Valdigreve—had risen up and drowned the clan rather than allow them to immigrate to Florence (ll. 143–144). For the most part the other families Cacciaguida mentions were noble at one time but now have degenerated—case after case presented as corrective to the pilgrim’s earlier pride in his lineage. Cacciaguida lists six Florentine families of the 11th century, including the Ughi and the Catellini, who he says were noble even in decline (ll. 88–90). All six were extinct by Dante’s day. He follows with a list of five more: the dell’Arca had died out by 1300, the Sanella were in exile, and the other three had lost all power and status. The della Pressa (l. 100) and the Galigai (l. 101) were Ghibelline families who had been exiled in 1258, and the Galigai’s houses were destroyed by the Guelphs in 1293 along with those of the Galli family (l. 103) and other Ghibellines. The once noble Visdomini and Tosinghi families administered the revenues of the episcopal see of Florence when it was vacant, and Dante suggests that they now deliberately

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prolonged those episcopal vacancies in order to line their own pockets (ll. 112–114). Cacciaguida finally mentions one family that was of low class in Cacciaguida’s day but by Dante’s day had risen to power as an “insolent, presumptuous clan” (l. 115)—the Adminari family—one of whom (Boccaccio Adminari) was given possession of Dante’s property when he was banished and subsequently opposed all proposals to recall the poet. While Cacciaguida enumerates more specific examples, these should suffice to underscore his point: first that Florence has degenerated since his day, and (on a more personal level) that glorification in one’s ancestors is futile—virtue is a function of character, not family. He ends by reiterating that his Florence lived in peace and the “lily on the staff” (l. 153) had not been reversed. He alludes here to the civil wars that had spurred the Guelphs in 1251 to change their banner from Florence’s traditional white lily on a red background to a red lily on white, while the Ghibellines kept the original colors. Canto 17 is the central canto of the Paradiso and so deals with material that Dante considered of essential significance (like Virgil’s discourse on love in Canto 17 of the Purgatorio). As the canto opens, Beatrice encourages the pilgrim to speak aloud his concern, for although both she and Cacciaguida can read it in the pilgrim’s mind, he needs the experience of heavenly discourse, because (as Cacciaguida tells him later in this canto) he will need to return to the earth and speak the truth there. The pilgrim’s question about his own future advances to a climax the autobiographical and political theme of the Comedy. The dark prophecies he has heard so often in his climb through Hell and Purgatory are here brought into the light and clarified by Cacciaguida. In the Inferno Ciacco had predicted that the Blacks would overthrow the Whites despite the counsel of “two just men” (Canto 6, ll. 61–75). Farinata told the pilgrim that he would learn the difficulty of returning from exile (Canto 10, ll. 79–81), and Brunetto Latini told him that both parties would attempt to “devour” him (Canto 15, ll. 61–72). Vanni Fucci, in order to grieve him, told the pilgrim how the Whites would be defeated so that none would escape unscathed (Canto 24,

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ll. 142–151). In the Purgatorio Corrado Malaspina prophesies that before seven years have passed, the pilgrim will learn firsthand the importance of receiving hospitality (Canto 8, ll. 133–139), and Oderisi warns the pilgrim that his own neighbor will help him learn the humility of begging for alms (Canto 11, ll. 139–142). Now Cacciaguida will clearly reveal Dante’s future (as Anchises did for Virgil’s Aeneas) by alluding to Boniface VIII’s plot to put the Blacks in power in Florence, the charges of fiscal corruption unjustly brought against Dante by the Blacks, his banishment from Florence, and his subsequent life in exile, dependent on the charity of others. But first Cacciaguida makes clear that his understanding of the pilgrim’s future reflected in the mind of God does not suggest that these events are predestined. Their cause (and blame) depends directly on the freely chosen actions of human beings. The events in the material world are contingent—a Scholastic term applied to something that is possible (that is, it may or may not exist), secondary (that is, dependent on something else for its existence), and finite (that is, mortal and limited). Divine foreknowledge is perfect because God is a necessary being (eternal and self-sufficient), but his foreknowledge does not impart necessity on contingent events because such events depend on human free will. Dante, like Hippolytus, will be forced to flee from his home city (ll. 46–48). In classical mythology Hippolytus was the son of Theseus and the Amazon queen Hippolyta. He rebuffed the amorous advances of his stepmother, Phaedra, who avenged her rejection by telling Theseus that Hippolytus had propositioned her. Theseus called down a curse on his son’s head, and Hippolytus was killed by his own horses when Poseidon sent a bull from the sea to destroy him. Cacciaguida’s point is that Dante, like Hippolytus, would be falsely accused, and that the accusers, like Phaedra, were self-interested hypocrites. The major hypocrite is, of course, Boniface, whom Cacciaguida calls “the one who plots” (l. 50). It was at Boniface’s bidding that Charles of Valois subjugated Florence and put the Blacks in power in November 1301, leading to the exile of

Dante and his fellow White Guelph leaders. But the presence of his fellow Whites will be, according to l. 62, Dante’s chief burden. Between 1302 and 1303 these exiles were involved in numerous schemes to retake power in Florence. When the Blacks refused to negotiate with the papal ambassador sent by Boniface’s successor, Benedict XI, to make peace in 1303, the Whites planned a major assault on the city but were crushed at La Lastra north of Florence on July 20, 1304. By that time Dante had cut ties with them and become, as Cacciaguida says, a party of one. Dante is told that he will be forced to leave everything that he loves “most dearly” (l. 56). Certainly this includes his native land and his position, but it may also be an allusion to his wife and children—the only such allusion in the whole poem. In one of the most admired tercets in the entire Comedy (ll. 59–61) Cacciaguida describes how Dante will taste the salty bread begged of others and will spend time going up and down the stairs of others’ houses. This comment leads directly to Cacciaguida’s identification of Dante’s first patron—the great Lombard nobleman with the coat of arms containing a ladder (scala in Italian) and eagle (symbol of allegiance to the empire). This was the crest of Bartolomeo della Scala, lord of Verona from 1301 to 1304, who welcomed the exiled Dante sometime before the debacle at La Lastra. The young man with the great martial future (l. 76) is Bartolomeo’s younger brother, Can Grande, who was to become Dante’s dearest patron and to whom Dante would dedicate the Paradiso. Although Can Grande is only nine years old at the fictional date of the Comedy, Cacciaguida predicts that he will be admired for his generosity and his heroism “even before the Gascon tricks proud Henry” (l. 82)—that is, before 1312, when Clement V (the Gascon pope) first supported and then abandoned Henry VII immediately after Henry was crowned emperor. It was in 1312 that Henry appointed Can Grande Imperial vicar and made him lord of Verona. Dante probably entered Can Grande’s service in Verona in about 1313, just after Henry’s death. Cacciaguida has told the pilgrim that because of his poetry his fame would live long after his enemies are dead. Now forewarned and braced for

Paradiso his ordeal, the pilgrim expresses his fears: On his journey through Hell and Purgatory he has learned many uncomfortable truths about members of the most powerful and prestigious families in Italy. As an exile he will need the support and protection of some of these same families. If he writes the truth, he will make his exile more difficult; if he fails to write the truth, he will relinquish his poetic reputation. But Cacciaguida convinces him that he owes it to posterity to speak the truth—that has been a chief reason for his divinely sanctioned journey through the afterlife, and the reason so many prominent people have spoken with him. In this exchange Cacciaguida has given Dante the pilgrim permission for Dante the poet’s sometimes harsh criticisms of his native city, of church authority, and of many important figures of contemporary society. The Comedy’s purpose as a corrective to society, by demonstrating the ultimate punishments and rewards for human behavior, is clearly outlined in this canto. As Canto 18 opens and the pilgrim turns over in his mind the sweet and the bitter aspects of what Cacciaguida has revealed to him about his future, Beatrice urges him to rise above the bitterness. In her allegorical role as Divine Wisdom she reminds him that God is just, and that she will always protect him. As he looks into her eyes, the heavenly bliss he sees there drives out all other thoughts. Cacciaguida has one more thing to tell the pilgrim: He introduces (in roughly chronological order) eight of the greatest warriors of God, who flash with special brilliance within the sparkling souls of the cross. Two of these are Old Testament heroes: Joshua, of course, was the successor of Moses and led the Israelite army in its conquest of the Promised Land of Canaan. Judas Maccabeus is the hero of the apocryphal books of Maccabees. When the Jewish faith was threatened and the Temple desecrated by the Syrian tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Judas Maccabeus led the Jewish revolt in 164 B.C.E.; he was ultimately killed in battle with the Syrians in 160 B.C.E. Four of the other warriors are earlier medieval figures who became legendary heroes of martial epics. Charlemagne had restored the Holy Roman Empire in the West when he was crowned by Pope

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Leo III in 800. He had fought the Lombards on behalf of the pope but was better known for his legendary battles against the Muslims of Spain. The same is true for Roland, Charlemagne’s nephew and greatest knight in the Old French epic chansons, whose fame rests on his heroic death at the hands of Saracens at Roncesvalles in Spain after being betrayed by his stepfather, Ganelon, according to the early 12th-century Song of Roland. William of Orange was another hero of a cycle of French chansons (the best known of which is Aliscans) in which he is depicted as one of Charlemagne’s generals. The historical William reportedly died in 812. Legend says he fought against the Saracens in southern France and that he died a monk. A lieutenant and brother-in-law of William in the epics, Rinoardo Rainouart was supposedly a giant who had been born a Saracen but converted to Christianity and, like his companion, ended his life in a monastery after taking holy orders. The last two warriors are from the more recent historical past: Godfrey of Bouillon, the duke of Lorraine, was well known as the leader of the First Crusade. Under Godfrey’s leadership the Christian armies recaptured Jerusalem in 1099. Godfrey was made the first Christian king of Jerusalem and died a year later in 1100. Robert Guiscard (that is, “Robert the Cunning”) was a Norman warrior who in 1046 joined his brothers in a war against the Saracens in southern Italy and Sicily, conquering much of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily for the Normans and becoming duke of Puglia and Calabria before he died in Salerno in 1085. In his choices of God’s warriors Dante may have been influenced somewhat by the popular tradition of the “Nine Worthies”—the nine greatest warriors of history, who included three classical, three Old Testament, and three Christian knights. The classical figures (Caesar, Alexander, and Hector of Troy) would have no place in Paradise, but Joshua and Judas Maccabeus are two of the Old Testament figures (the other is King David, who will appear among the just rulers in the next sphere). Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon were among the Christian warriors—the other was King Arthur, whom Dante has left out completely (perhaps because of his connection

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with the lechery embodied in the Lancelot legend that led Francesca and Paolo astray). The Cacciaguida episode now draws to a close as the pilgrim and Beatrice rise to the sphere of Jupiter. This episode has filled Cantos 15–17 and has taken up half of Cantos 14 and 18 as well, thus spreading over some 550 lines. Cacciaguida himself has spoken 299 lines—more than any other character in the Comedy with the exception of Virgil, Beatrice, and the pilgrim himself. Now Beatrice and the pilgrim rise to the sixth sphere, that of Jupiter, which Dante calls the “temperate” star. Dante knew (and refers to the fact in the Convivio 2.13.25) that Ptolemy had called Jupiter “temperate,” the mean between the heat of red Mars and the cold of Saturn. The planet’s association with this virtue as well as with the chief of the pagan gods may have suggested to Dante the connection between Jupiter and the just rulers with whom he inhabits the sphere. The pilgrim calls on the “Muse of Pegasus” (alluding to the legend that the winged horse Pegasus had created the Muses’ spring Hippocrene when he struck the earth with his hoof) to help him describe the phenomenal sight he witnesses here: In a performance uncannily reminiscent of an advertisement in modern neon lights, the glowing souls of the just spell out the Latin phrase that opens the book of Wisdom, “Love righteousness, you rulers of the earth” (NRSV), suggesting that all legitimate earthly government must be based first on justice. The spirits of this sphere maintain the shape of the final letter they have formed for some time. It is an M, perhaps suggesting monarchy, the only form of government under which justice was possible, as Dante had argued in De monarchia (1.9.2). The M first shapes itself into a fleur-de-lis, the heraldic symbol of both Florence and the French monarchy. The lily then reshapes itself into the form of the Imperial eagle. The suggestion may be that Florence and France, which in 1300 seem to be charting their own course in league with the pope and against the empire, should instead merge their interests with those of the emperor, as the lily here merges with the eagle, the symbol of Imperial justice. Perhaps the connotations of the lily are what set the pilgrim’s mind thinking about the abuses of the

papacy, but in any case the eagle as symbol of Imperial justice—the reflection of divine justice—spurs the pilgrim to deliver his angry tirade against the papacy’s abuses. It is generally agreed that Dante’s use of the singular pronoun you in l. 130 is a reference to JOHN XXII (pope from 1316 to 1334), the reigning pope at the time Dante was writing this canto. After encouragement in the previous canto by Cacciaguida, who told the pilgrim to speak the truth boldly no matter whom it might offend, the poet here makes the boldest criticism in the entire Comedy. John, notorious for denying Christians the sacrament (the bread of l. 128) by placing individuals and territories under excommunication or interdiction over purely political disagreements, is here accused of doing so solely out of greed: When John canceled these excommunications and interdictions, he received a fee for doing so and amassed a sizable fortune. For Dante this was simony pure and simple, and the unjust perversion of the church’s role in making God’s grace accessible to all. Dante ends the canto with a bitterly satiric portrait of John, who asserts that all of his efforts are focused on John the Baptist—the saint whose portrait adorns the gold florin—but that he knows nothing of his supposed role models, Paul and “your Fisherman” (l. 136) (a somewhat contemptuous dismissal of Peter and his lowly, nonlucrative occupation). Pope John had excommunicated Can Grande della Scala in 1317, and this canto may reflect Dante’s reaction to that event. When Can Grande ultimately died in 1329, he was still under the sentence of excommunication. Aside from Dante’s personal bitterness toward Pope John, certainly one of the reasons for this somewhat digressive condemnation of the papacy at this point is intercanticle balance. We should remember that it was in Canto 19 of the Inferno (the 18th canto of the Inferno proper) that the pilgrim encountered the simoniacs, stuffed headfirst into mock-baptismal fonts in the third pit of Malebolge. Among these of course was POPE NICHOLAS III, waiting to be replaced by Boniface VIII and Clement V. In Canto 19 of the Purgatorio the pilgrim had met another pope, ADRIAN V, purging his greed on the terrace of the avaricious. The choice of his future seems clear to John XXII: He can still

Paradiso repent and thereby join Adrian V in Purgatory. But if he does not repent, John will ultimately replace Clement V, burning in the grotesque baptismal parody in Hell. Jupiter is the only one of the heavenly spheres in which no single individual soul speaks to the pilgrim. Having presented the Comedy’s two most loquacious souls—Thomas Aquinas and Cacciaguida—in the two previous spheres, Dante varies his format in Canto 19 and presents the spirits of the just, formed as a collective in the shape of an Imperial eagle, speaking with a single voice. This suggests not only the perfect harmony that may be achieved within a justly governed empire, but also the unity of will among the just who are in conformity to God’s just will. Justice thus becomes the theme of the canto, which begins with the question about God’s justice toward nonbelievers and ends with the eagle’s condemnation of unjust contemporary Christian rulers. The pilgrim’s burning question, as expressed in lines 70–78 by the eagle (whose individual souls read the pilgrim’s mind), is as follows: If a person born on the Indus River (the extreme eastern edge of the world as Dante conceived it) has never heard of Christ but has lived a blameless life, how can it be just for God eternally to damn such a person? This is a question that has certainly been building since the pilgrim’s visit to Limbo in Canto 4 of the Inferno, where Virgil introduced the souls there who had not sinned but were sentenced to that circle because “they did not know Baptism” (l. 35). It surfaced again in Purgatory when Virgil hung his head in anguish at the thought of the souls—Plato and Aristotle, and doubtlessly him as well—languishing in Limbo (Purgatorio 3, ll. 40–45). Surely the pilgrim here has in mind the fate of Virgil, and of the other righteous souls he has seen damned. The eagle’s answer is essentially no answer at all. First it asserts God’s infinite power, surpassing anything in his creation. To illustrate this transcendent power, the eagle points to Lucifer (“that first proud one” of line 46), God’s greatest creation, who was unable to attain perfection on his own and was cast out of Heaven for his presumption. How then, the eagle asks, can the vastly inferior human intellect

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understand God’s thoughts? All our human mind can comprehend is the great gulf between its own understanding and God’s. From this the eagle goes on not to resolve the pilgrim’s uncertainty but to chastise him for having the audacity to ask such a question in the first place. In this the eagle sounds a good deal like the voice of God answering Job from out of the whirlwind in Job 38.2–4: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? . . . Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (NRSV). The eagle asks, “Who are you to sit in judgment’s seat / and pass on things a thousand miles away, / when you can hardly see beyond your nose?” (ll. 79–81). There might be room to argue and dispute, the eagle concedes, if men did not have the Scriptures, but as it is there is no room to question. Justice, says the eagle, is whatever God says it is. And that, essentially, is that salvation is available only to those with faith in Christ—the Christ to come in the case of Old Testament Jews, the risen Christ for those who lived after. While Dante no doubt believed that the justice of God was inviolable and probably incomprehensible to the human mind, the vehemence of the eagle’s response to the pilgrim seems extreme. This might be explained by the nature of the eagle itself: Conformity to the will of God is what chiefly characterizes the eagle and its one voice. The questioning of God’s justice is, for this conglomerate being, unthinkable. Yet most readers will find the eagle’s answer to Dante’s sincere and intense question to be unsatisfying. Even all Christians, however, will not be saved, the eagle continues—some will end up farther from God than the pagans in Limbo. Over a space of nine tercets the eagle lists some 12 current European monarchs, all of whom are charged with injustice of one kind or another. As he had in Canto 12 of the Purgatorio, Dante uses the rhetorical figure of anaphora, beginning the first three tercets with the word li (there), the second three with the verb vedrassi (the book will show), and the last three with the conjunction e (and). The first words of the tercets thus form the pattern lll vvv eee, spelling out lue (the letter v was interchangeable with u at the time)—the Italian word for “pestilence,” Dante’s

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judgment on unjust monarchs, many of whom he has previously censured. The first tercet concerns Albert I of Austria, titular Holy Roman Emperor (1298–1308), who, jealous of the growing power of Prague, invaded Bohemia in 1304. (Dante has already chastised Albert for ignoring his responsibilities in Italy in Purgatorio 6, ll. 97–99.) The second tercet condemns Philip IV (“the Fair”) of France for devaluing the French currency in order to pay for his wars, an act that caused economic misery in his country. Called in Purgatorio 7, l. 109 the “Plague of France” for, among other things, trying forcibly to coerce Boniface VIII by kidnapping him in 1303 (see Purgatorio 20, ll. 86–87), Philip was killed during a royal boar hunt; therefore his “death will wear the hide of a wild boar” (l. 120). In the third tercet the eagle condemns the kings of England and Scotland for not staying within their country’s bounds, here alluding to the wars of Edward I against the Scots leaders William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. In the fourth tercet the eagle condemns the debauched life of Ferdinand IV, king of León and Castile (1295–1312), and the cowardice of Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia (who had been chastised in Purgatorio 7, ll. 101–102 for lust and idleness). The next tercet attacks the “cripple of Jerusalem”—that is, Charles II of Anjou, or Charles the Lame, titular king of Jerusalem as well as king of Naples (1285– 1309). Called the “third Charles” by Hugh Capet in Purgatorio 20, where he is reviled for selling his daughter in marriage (l. 80), Charles is here said to have an M—that is, a thousand—villainies listed in God’s book of judgment. Two tercets are devoted to Frederick II (1296– 1337), the lord of the “island of the fire” (i.e., Sicily, with its volcanic Mount Etna). Frederick is mentioned in Purgatorio 7, l. 119, as lacking the virtue of his father (Peter III of Aragon). Here the eagle essentially calls him worthless (ll. 133–135). The eighth tercet adds that Frederick’s brother and uncle both disgrace their heritage, the Crown of Aragon. This refers to James II of Aragon, Frederick’s brother (and equally lacking in virtue according to Purgatorio 7), and his uncle, King James of Majorca, who in 1284 joined the French king Philip III in a thwarted campaign against his own brother,

Pedro III of Aragon—a mistake that cost him his kingdom until his nephew, James, restored it to him in 1295. In the ninth and final tercet of the series the eagle adds three more kings who pervert justice. One is Norway’s King Haakon V (1299–1319), who spent most of his reign making war on neighboring Denmark. The second is King Diniz of Portugal (1279–1325). While historians generally see Diniz as one of the better monarchs of the age, Dante may have disdained Diniz for not fighting against the Spanish Moors, or for confiscating the wealth of the Portuguese Knights Templars when Pope Clement V disbanded the order. (Diniz restored the treasure when the former Templars regrouped as the Order of Christ in 1319.) The last king condemned by the eagle is Stephen Urosh II of Rascia (now in Serbia) (1275–1321). In addition to divorcing three wives and blinding his own son for plotting against him, Urosh was infamous for counterfeiting Venetian coins and thereby causing economic hardship throughout the region. The Imperial eagle ends its review of the current state of European politics with the wish that Hungary will escape further harm (the throne, rightly due to Charles Martel, had been usurped by Andrew III), and that Navarre, the Pyrenean kingdom of southern France and northern Spain, might protect itself from French rule. In fact after Joanna of Navarre married Philip the Fair in 1284, their son, Louis, became king of Navarre upon her death in 1304 and then became Louis X of France upon the death of his father in 1314—thus putting Navarre under the rule of the French monarchy. To illustrate the undesirability of French rule, the eagle cites Nicosia and Famagosta, two Cyprian cities suffering under the unstable rule of the French house of Lusignan, whose debauched king, Henry II, made an ill-advised assault on the Holy Land in 1291. He was imprisoned and declared unfit to rule by his brother, Amalric, who was himself assassinated, and the ineffectual Henry was restored to the throne. Once again it is instructive to compare Canto 19 to parallel cantos in the previous two canticles. Inferno 20 depicts the bolgia of the soothsayers, whose attempts to penetrate God’s secrets are pun-

Paradiso ished as arrogant efforts to go beyond the knowledge allotted to human beings—just as Dante’s question concerning divine justice in this canto angers the eagle, who sees it as an inappropriate probing of a divine mystery. The second part of this canto parallels Canto 20 of the Purgatorio, in which Hugh Capet berates his entire progeny of French rulers, including Philip IV and Charles II of Anjou, censured here once again. Canto 20 of the Paradiso also recalls to some extent the 20th canto of the Purgatorio: In the earlier text Dante and Virgil meet Hugh Capet on the terrace of avarice, where Hugh delivers a sweeping condemnation of his descendants in the Capetian line of French rulers for their scheming and their greed. In particular he denounces the three Charleses—Charles of Anjou, Charles of Valois, and Charles II of Anjou—and he repeats the ironic phrase “to make amends” as he lists each new enormity committed by his family. These avaricious rulers contrast sharply with the just rulers of this heavenly sphere, as the hopeful and positive repeated phrase “and now he knows” of this canto contrasts with the sarcastic phrase of the Purgatorio. When the eagle tells the pilgrim to look closely at its eye at the beginning of the canto, we need to remember that Dante is imagining the eagle in the form of the heraldic emblem of the Empire and therefore in profile. Thus the eagle has only one eye visible to the pilgrim. The six souls making up this eye are the most exalted in this sphere of Jupiter, and Dante makes two of them Christians, two Old Testament Jews, and (surprisingly) two pagans. Dante describes six just rulers, devoting two tercets (or six lines) to each of them here in this sixth heavenly sphere. Once again he employs the rhetorical device of anaphora, beginning the second tercet of each description with the same phrase, ora conosce (and now he knows). Thus each of these souls in Paradise now understands something much more clearly than he did in life. In the case of King David he now knows more clearly what part divine inspiration played in the psalms he wrote, and to what extent his own genius cooperated with that inspiration. This question of grace and human cooperation foreshadows the discussion of Ripheus’s salvation later in the canto.

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Trajan, having been in both Heaven and Hell, has learned the great cost of unbelief. Dante’s first readers would have been familiar with the popular legend of Gregory the Great, who so admired Trajan for his reputation as a just ruler (based on episodes like his halting his army to help the grieving widow, related in Purgatorio 10, ll. 73–93) that he fervently prayed for Trajan’s salvation. The legend affirms that God restored Trajan to life long enough for him to hear the Gospel, believe, and be baptized by Gregory. Thus Trajan in fact died a Christian. Hezekiah was a king of Judah at the time of the prophet Isaiah. On his sickbed he is warned by Isaiah of his impending death, at which he weeps and prays to the Lord. As a result of his prayer Hezekiah is granted 15 more years of life. What he now knows is the extent to which prayer may affect God’s foreordained plan without actually changing the providentially determined outcome (ll. 52–54). As in David’s case this foreshadows a later discussion in the canto regarding Trajan’s salvation. This comment also recalls the pilgrim’s earlier discussion with Virgil about the efficacy of prayer, in Canto 6 of the Purgatorio. There Virgil had said that the prayers of souls outside God’s grace were ineffectual, but that those of the souls in grace were loving prayers, which were always in accord with God’s will and so may well be answered. But Virgil, declaring that discussions of grace were outside his purview, tells the pilgrim that Beatrice will have to provide a fuller answer. It appears that these lines are the fulfillment of that promise. What the emperor Constantine has learned, Dante says, is that God does not blame him for the bad consequences of a good action. Constantine’s intent in leaving the Western Empire to the jurisdiction of the pope was charity to the church. He cannot be blamed for the greed and abuse of power that, in Dante’s view, have been the result of that donation. In this Dante is following Thomas Aquinas, who in discussing this precise issue had said, “The virtue of a cause is measured by the effect that flows from the nature of the cause, not by that which results by accident” (ST 1.2, q. 20, a. 5). William II of Naples and Sicily was called “William the Good” by his subjects, who thus distinguished him from his father, “William the Bad.”

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Dante’s William, who married Joan, daughter of England’s King Henry II, was known for his generosity and his endowment of religious institutions, some of which he founded himself. When he died at the age of 35 his subjects were genuinely grieved. They have good reason to grieve now, says the eagle, since the Sicilian king at the time of the Comedy is that same Charles II condemned by Hugh Capet in Purgatory. Now exalted in the Heaven of Jupiter William has learned how much a righteous king is loved in Heaven. The last figure in the eagle’s eyebrow is the most surprising. While the legend of Trajan and Gregory was well known, the story of this second pagan, Ripheus, was not. Virgil had mentioned his death in the Aeneid with the brief comment that he was “of all the Trojans / . . . most fair-minded, the one who was most regardful of justice” (2.426–427). Since nothing else was known of him, Dante felt free to invent Ripheus’s salvation. Living more than 1,000 years before Christ, the pagan Ripheus was given the grace to believe in the Christ to come (like those Jews harrowed from Limbo by Christ). And now Ripheus understands more about God’s inscrutable grace than any living man—for, as the eagle asks, “Who in your erring world would have believed” that such salvation was possible (l. 67)? The pilgrim’s frustration at this group of souls is understandable, since he has so recently been reprimanded for questioning the justice of damnation for virtuous pagans. The assertion that begins the eagle’s explanation needs some explaining: The Kingdom of Heaven “suffers violence / gladly from fervent love, from vibrant hope,” the eagle says (ll. 94–95), not because God is in fact defeated, but rather because “That will wills its own defeat, and so / defeated it defeats through its own mercy” (ll. 98–99). In other words (recalling the situation of Hezekiah) God is always inclined toward mercy and is eager to temper his justice when the loving and hopeful prayers of those in tune with his are offered to him. Here in the sphere of justice we are reminded that the most perfect justice requires the judicious application of mercy. The eagle explains that both Trajan and Ripheus died as Christians. The prayers of Gregory, made through hope and love, moved God to take the

soul of Trajan from Limbo and restore him to his body. In that restored body Trajan accepted the Christian faith and, presumably, was baptized. Of course it should not be assumed that God’s mind had been changed, but rather that he had already granted Trajan his grace, and that Gregory was doing his will by praying for Trajan’s salvation. Thomas Aquinas, considering the case of Trajan, argues that his case is not unique, since the Gospels record others who were raised from the dead. All must have been granted God’s grace prior to the events recorded: Concerning the incident of Trajan it may be supposed with probability that he was recalled to life at the prayers of blessed Gregory, and thus obtained the grace whereby he received the pardon of his sins and in consequence was freed from punishment. The same applies to all those who were miraculously raised from the dead, many of whom were evidently idolaters and damned. For we must needs say likewise of all such persons that they were consigned to hell, not finally, but as was actually due to their own merits according to justice: and that according to higher causes, in view of which it was foreseen that they would be recalled to life, they were to be disposed of otherwise. (ST 3, suppl., q. 71, a. 5)

The case of Ripheus is more complex. Dante begins with the hypothesis that Ripheus’s remarkable devotion to justice must have been inspired by the operation of grace. Ripheus’s willing and avid cooperation with that grace enabled God to bestow upon him the additional grace of revelation (ll. 118–121). His case is not unlike that of David and the psalms discussed earlier. Aquinas speaks of these two kinds of grace—operating and cooperating—in ST 1.2, q. 111, a. 2. More important Aquinas also endorses the concept of special revelation granted to pre-Christian pagans: Many of the gentiles received revelations of Christ, as is clear from their predictions. Thus we read (Job 19.25): “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” The Sibyl too foretold certain things about Christ, as Augustine states (Contra Faust. xiii, 15). . . . If, however, some were saved with-

Paradiso out receiving any revelation, they were not saved without faith in a Mediator, for, though they did not believe in Him explicitly, they did, nevertheless, have implicit faith through believing in Divine providence, since they believed that God would deliver mankind in whatever way was pleasing to Him. (ST 2.2, q. 2, a. 7)

Of course Ripheus lacks the necessary sacrament of baptism, but Dante deals with this difficulty by looking at the meaning and purpose of baptism rather than the symbolic ceremony. In baptism one’s sins are forgiven and one is to receive a new spiritual life through the grace of God. For Dante God’s infusing of the three theological virtues (of faith, hope, and charity) into Ripheus had the effect of a true baptism. The kind of argument Dante presents here was condemned as heretical by the Council of Trent in the 16th century, but it seems to have had some currency in the 14th century, since a similar notion is put forward by William Langland in passus 12 of Piers Plowman, where three kinds of baptism are listed: baptism of water, of blood (martyrdom), and of true belief (ll. 282–283). The canto ends with the eagle’s praise of predestination (ll. 130–132), used here in the limited sense of election for salvation. No one on earth can fathom the mystery of God’s saving grace, though clearly it can extend to pagans (including, it must be assumed, Dante’s hypothetical virtuous soul on the shore of the Indus from Canto 19). So great is the mystery that even the souls of the blessed, who are in direct communion with God, cannot fathom it. They do, however, rejoice, since their wills are in perfect accord with God’s. In Canto 21 the pilgrim enters the sphere of Saturn, which is the sphere of the contemplatives and the seventh and last of the planetary spheres. Named for the mythical god who reigned during the classical golden age (the classical poets’ misreading of the Earthly Paradise, according to Matelda in Canto 28 of the Purgatorio), this sphere is a transitional one, a sphere of silence and a more austere, unsmiling Beatrice. Like the monastic life it imitates, the sphere of Saturn comprises contemplative souls who have left behind earthly concerns.

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The golden ladder is an appropriate symbol of the contemplative life. Most obviously it recalls the ladder of Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28.12, “And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it” (NRSV), after which the Lord speaks to him. Traditionally this ladder is a symbol of a connection or relationship between humankind and the heavenly realm. Singleton (Paradiso 2.348) also points out that the symbol occurs as well on the robe of Lady Philosophy in Book 1, Prose 1 of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, where it forms a bridge from the letter pi (indicating practical philosophy, like ethics) to the letter theta (indicating contemplative philosophy, like metaphysics). Further the symbol seems in the 14th century to have become conventionally associated with disciplined spiritual meditation, as it is in Walter Hilton’s late 14thcentury Scale of Perfection, in which the steps represent ascending stages of contemplation with the ultimate goal of union with God. Certainly that union is the chief aim of the souls on the golden ladder in this sphere. One soul, however, descends the ladder to speak with Dante, compelled by the superior force of love and conformity to God’s will. He responds to the pilgrim’s questions by answering the second, or easier, question first, explaining that there is no sound in this sphere because Dante’s mortal ears could not bear it. The first question raises once more the problem of predestination that had lain behind the case of Trajan in the previous canto, where it applied specifically to one chosen for salvation. As the eagle asserted there, so Peter Damian asserts here: No one, no matter how intimate he may have become with the mind of God, can fathom God’s choices regarding the predestined—and, in a kind of righteous indignation that forms a transition to the last part of the canto, Peter rebukes all those on earth who speculate about such things. One can assume that this kind of speculation ought to be outside the contemplative’s consideration as he advances up the rungs of the ladder by meditating on the goodness and grace of God. From here Peter goes on to condemn those wealthy princes of the church who seem to have

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abandoned the contemplative life altogether. Dante’s choice of Peter Damian as the spokesman for this canto was no accident: Peter, born in poverty, became a Benedictine monk and rose to the position of prior and then abbot of the monastery of Fonte Avellana. A prolific writer, he consistently defended the ascetic lifestyle and the strict application of the Benedictine rule, recommending among other practices mortification of the flesh. He worked zealously with several popes including Hildebrand (Gregory VII) to reform the church and in his later years—against his wishes—was named cardinal of Ostia. His sarcastic denunciation of the luxurious and worldly lifestyles of the modern-day prelates, who need an army of retainers to prop up their obese backsides, is doubly appropriate from a figure famed for the extremity of his rejection of worldly vanities. The tercet including lines 121–123 has caused a great deal of controversy among commentators, far more than its relative importance in the canto warrants. Peter identifies himself as Peter Damian, or Peter the Sinner, in “Our Lady’s House” (l. 122). The prevailing opinion now seems to be that Dante is repeating a common error in confusing Peter Damian with Peter the Sinner, who had founded a monastery near the city of Ravenna called Santa Maria in Porto. The ending of Canto 21 is one of the most dramatic in the Paradiso, as the myriad contemplative souls suddenly break the monastic silence of the sphere to shout out a thunderous approval of Peter’s denunciation of the contemporary church hierarchy, so loud that it frightens the pilgrim. In this Dante again repeats a motif that parallels the previous two canticles: In the Purgatorio Canto 20 had ended with all of Purgatory breaking into a loud shout of praise, which in Canto 21 the pilgrim discovers was the response to Statius’s release from the mountain. The shout of righteous anger here parallels and contrasts the shout of joy and praise there. Both of these are paralleled by the ironic foreshadowing of the Inferno’s Canto 21—which ends in the mock-serious military bugle blast of Malacoda’s fart saluting the demonic band of the Malebranche. That comic scene, and the absurd self-importance of the military demons, may even

be deliberately recalled here by the ironically humorous tone of Peter’s censure of the clergy. The description of Beatrice protecting the pilgrim as a mother protects her child that begins Canto 22 (ll. 4–6) will not be the last such reference in the Paradiso. More important perhaps is her translation of the great shout with which the contemplative souls ended the previous canto: It is a prayer, she says, that prophesies the vengeance of God on the corrupt clergy within Dante’s lifetime. Commentators have suggested a number of possible events to which Dante may be referring, including the imprisonment of Boniface VIII at Anagni by agents of Philip IV in 1303 or the election of Clement V in 1305 and the subsequent removal of the papal seat to Avignon. But since Dante clearly viewed both of these as disasters for the Church Militant (see Purgatorio, Canto 32), it is highly unlikely he would have seen them in this canto as the work of God. It seems more probable that this prophecy parallels that of Beatrice in Purgatorio 33, ll. 43–44, and as her “five hundred, ten, and five” does, alludes to some vague future triumph of the emperor (or, since Henry VII was dead by the time Dante wrote this canto, of a leader like Can Grande as the emperor’s agent). The pilgrim’s conversation with Saint Benedict underscores the character of this sphere as the Heaven of the contemplatives. Benedict, born in Nursia (ca. 480) and educated in Rome, became disenchanted with the corruption in human society and withdrew to live in a cave on Mount Subiaco around 500. In about 529 he and a number of disciples moved to Monte Cassino, where Benedict founded what was to become the central monastery of the Benedictine order. It was at Monte Cassino that he composed his Regula monachorum, a strict rule intended to regulate the lives of previously itinerant monks. Benedict’s rule bound his followers to strict vows and committed them to lives of prayer and education, manual labor, and of course contemplation. It soon became the model of all monasticism in the Western Church. The two other souls to whom Benedict introduces the pilgrim are also contemplatives: Saint Romualdo (956–1027) had founded an order of hermits at Camaldoli who followed a reformed ver-

Paradiso sion of the Benedictine rule. They became known as the Camaldolese order. The identity of Macarius is less certain, because there were a number of saints by that name. The two most probable candidates were easily confused, since they were contemporaries and were both disciples of Saint Anthony. Macarius of Egypt, or Macarius the Elder, lived as a hermit in the desert from his 30th year until his death in 391 at the age of 90. Macarius of Alexandria, or Macarius the Younger, is said to have been responsible for some 5,000 monks and hence is credited with the founding of the monastic tradition in the Eastern Church. It seems probable that Dante had the latter saint in mind, in order to balance Saint Benedict directly. However it also seems quite possible that Dante and most of his contemporaries as well did not see the two Macariuses as separate individuals. The pilgrim’s desire to see Benedict face-to-face is certainly understandable, since neither he nor the readers have seen the physical form of any souls since Purgatory. The knowledge that the pilgrim’s vision—associated, as usual in the Comedy, with knowledge—will be complete in the Empyrean is important both as a promise of the grace to be bestowed on the pilgrim and as an assertion by Benedict of the ultimate reward of the contemplative life: The top of the golden ladder reaches the highest Heaven and there finds perfect understanding. When Benedict refers to every wish coming true there, he refers to virtuous wishes—and since only those whose wills are in concord with God’s enter that place, all of their wishes will, indeed, be perfect. As for those who abandon the arduous climb up the contemplative ladder—monks who begin the ascetic life but abandon his rule—Benedict has only scorn and derision for them. His rule has become a waste of parchment, he complains (l. 75), and he castigates modern-day monks for their greed in bestowing the goods of the church on their own families or worse (by which he alludes to the concubines and bastard children), rather than on the poor, to whom by rights they belong (ll. 82–84). From the sphere of the contemplatives the pilgrim and Beatrice rise to the fixed stars in the constellation of Gemini—the sign under which Dante

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was born in 1265 (indicating that he was born between May 18 and June 17 of that year). In line 106 Dante begins what will be his last direct address to the reader, swearing that what he is about to narrate—the culminating cantos of his great work—all occurred just as he tells them. Dante has already emphasized the importance of stellar influence on human character. Brunetto Latini had told the pilgrim in Canto 15 of the Inferno, “Follow your constellation / and you cannot fail to reach your port of glory” (ll. 55–56). Marco Lombardo had indicated in Canto 16 of the Purgatorio that “The spheres initiate your tendencies” (l. 73), though he had insisted that human free will could choose to accept or resist those inclinations. Here Dante credits the stars of Gemini with his poetic talents, since those born under this sign were allegedly inclined toward intellectual and artistic pursuits. Ultimately he turns his apostrophe to his natal constellation into an invocation, asking the stars to grant him the genius that will be necessary for him to conquer his final challenge and to see his work through to the end. No longer will he rely on the Muses sacred to the pagan poets; from now on Dante relies only on the God-given talent and inspiration granted him through the stars that twinkled at his birth. Perhaps the best-known part of this canto is the pilgrim’s backward glance, as he stares down from the heaven of the fixed stars and smiles at the puniness of the inhabited world that causes human beings such great anxiety. The passage is a trope, or traditional theme, going back to the sixth book of Cicero’s De re publica, recounting the dream of Scipio (Dante would have known the theme from Macrobius’s fourth-century Commentary on the Dream of Scipio). A similar scene also occurs in Meter 7 of Book 2 of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Chaucer was to continue the tradition after Dante, ending his Troilus and Criseyde with the ascension of Troilus’s soul to the eighth sphere, where he looks down on the earth and on his own body and laughs. In Dante’s text the allegorical significance of this passage should not be ignored: Having reached the eighth sphere by ascending the ladder of contemplation, the pilgrim sees the insignificance of worldly concerns. The “puny threshing-ground” that “drives

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us / mad” (ll. 151–152) is the place where worldly men strive to possess as much as they can, sparked by their misdirected love of the lesser goods of the world. The true contemplatives focus their will on the highest good and therefore see the insignificance of worldly things. Ultimately this is what the pilgrim does when he turns from his view of the earth to lose himself in the beauty of Beatrice’s eyes: Her eyes embody the beauty of the highest good that they reflect. The pilgrim’s love of them depicts his rejection of the world’s lesser goods.

DANTE’S EXAMINATION: SPHERES OF THE FIXED STARS AND THE PRIMUM MOBILE (CANTOS 23–29) Synopsis Dante opens Canto 23 with an epic simile comparing Beatrice anxiously watching the sky to a mother bird watching for daylight and the chance to go in search of food for her young. Her expectation is rewarded by the appearance of the hosts of the Church Triumphant. Looking up, the pilgrim sees innumerable radiant lights—all of Christ’s redeemed souls—descending, with one great sun among them that seems to give light to them all. His eyes cannot bear the brightness, and Beatrice tells him that this is the wisdom and power of Christ himself, which created the passage from earth to Heaven and against which nothing can stand. As he gazes at the sight, the mind of the pilgrim expands and transcends his own consciousness, so that he has no memory of what he saw. Beatrice calls the pilgrim back to his senses and encourages him now to look into her face and gaze upon her smile. Now that he has endured the direct vision of Christ in glory, his eyes can stand up to anything. The pilgrim looks into Beatrice’s smiling face, but he admits that he must skip over any attempt to portray it, because its beauty is beyond description. Now Beatrice encourages the pilgrim to look around at the myriad radiant souls of those redeemed by Christ, whom she calls Christ’s garden. Christ himself has now removed to a higher plane, to enable the pilgrim to see more clearly the lights of the souls in the garden. Beatrice points first to the rose that she calls the Virgin Mary,

and the lilies that she calls the apostles, who led humankind to salvation. When the pilgrim’s eyes have drunk in the glorious star of Mary’s presence, to whom he says he prays day and night, a flaming crown descends from Heaven and melodiously encircles the luminosity of the Virgin. The ring of flame sings out, identifying itself as angelic love encompassing the source of supreme joy and summoning the Virgin to follow her Son to the highest Heaven. Now all of the lights sing out the name of Mary, after which Mary herself ascends to the outermost sphere of Heaven, the Primum Mobile— which Dante calls the “regal mantle folding itself round / the turning spheres” (ll. 112–113)—currently so far distant that the pilgrim’s sight is not able to follow her where she rises. Like infants reaching up for their mother, the souls of the blessed yearn after their departed Mary, as they begin to sing the hymn Regina coeli (“Queen of Heaven”) in tones the pilgrim will never forget. As the canto draws to a close, the pilgrim praises the virtues of the crowd of blessed souls he sees in this sphere, his eyes finally coming to rest on the figure of Saint Peter. As Canto 24 opens, Beatrice addresses the blessed souls who remain in this sphere, using the metaphor of a feast to ask that the pilgrim be granted some drop of that truth for which he thirsts. The radiant souls begin to spin wildly at various speeds, reflecting the extent of their joy at being able to share their love with the pilgrim. The brightest of all these lights dances a circle three times around Beatrice, accompanied by heavenly music that Dante can no longer remember. This is the radiance of SAINT PETER, chief among the lights of the Church Triumphant now that Christ and Mary have removed themselves to the Empyrean Heaven. Beatrice, addressing Peter as the keeper of the keys to Paradise, asks that he test the pilgrim on his faith—the faith that enabled Peter himself to walk upon the water. She adds that Peter will already know whether the pilgrim possesses the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love but specifically asks that Peter examine his faith here before these souls in order to glorify the faith that won them that realm by putting it into words.

Paradiso The pilgrim prepares to answer Peter’s questions, comparing himself to a university student preparing for an oral examination. Peter first asks for a definition of faith, and for this the pilgrim alludes to the words of Hebrews 11.1, saying that faith is “the substance of those hoped for things / and argument for things we have not seen” (ll. 64– 65). Like a Scholastic master. Peter asks why the terms substance and argument are used. The pilgrim replies that since human beings cannot directly know the joys of Heaven, for them those joys exist only in their faith; thus faith is the substance (i.e., the material thing) on which the hope of those joys stands. The faith itself then becomes the evidence, or basis for argument, in metaphysical or theological questions. After expressing approval of his answer, Peter goes on to ask the pilgrim whether he possesses this treasure of faith. The pilgrim responds that he does indeed have the coin of faith in his purse. Peter asks where he got his faith, and the pilgrim replies from the Scriptures. At this the saint wonders how the pilgrim knows that the Holy Scriptures do in fact contain the word of God, to which the pilgrim replies that the miracles done in the name of those Holy Scriptures convince him of their truth. To this Peter, like a Scholastic logician, points out that the pilgrim is begging the question, using as proof that which still needs to be proved. But the pilgrim answers that if the Christian faith had spread throughout the world as far as it has without the help of those recorded miracles, then that growth would in fact be a miracle greater than any other. At this all the souls of this sphere sing out a loud Te Deum laudamus (“Glory to God”) in appreciation of the pilgrim’s answers, and Peter gives his approval, finally asking the pilgrim to proclaim his faith by reciting his creed, and then to declare the source of his faith. The pilgrim affirms his belief in one God, the unmoved mover and creator of the universe, who is made known to him through philosophical argument as well as through Moses, the prophets, the psalms, the Gospels, and apostles like Peter himself. And he believes in the Trinity, made known to him particularly in the Gospels. At this answer Saint Peter is so overjoyed that he

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embraces the pilgrim and then, singing a blessing, encircles him three times. Dante begins Canto 25—his canto on hope— with the expression of his own most ardent hope in life: that his poem will win him such favor in his native Florence that by means of its reputation he will be allowed to return to his home, where, at the site of his own baptism at San Giovanni, he will assume the laurel crown reserved for the most revered of poets. He then picks up the story as another brilliant light leaves the throng in this eighth sphere and approaches him and his guide. With great joy Beatrice recognizes this radiance as the one “who draws souls to Galicia”—that is, SAINT JAMES, whose burial site at Campostela was a major pilgrimage shrine. His purpose here is to act as the apostle of hope, and Beatrice requests that he examine her charge on the virtue of hope. James first tells the pilgrim to lift his eyes, which the pilgrim has lowered because of the excessive radiance of Peter and James together. James then charges the pilgrim to take hope to others once he has returned to the world, since God has granted him the grace of seeing Heaven itself before his own death. Finally James proceeds to pose three questions to the pilgrim: What is hope? How much does the pilgrim personally possess? And what is the source of his hope? To ensure that the pilgrim shows no lack of humility, Beatrice begins by answering the second question first. The pilgrim possesses as much hope as any member of the Church Militant, she says; that is why he has been granted the grace to leave Egypt (the world) and look at Jerusalem (Heaven) while still in his living flesh. She then leaves the other two questions to the pilgrim. The pilgrim defines hope as “sure expectancy of future bliss” (l. 67) and the product of God’s grace and human worth. As to where his hope originates from the pilgrim cites many sources but in particular singles out the psalms of David—paraphrasing Psalm 9.10 as “Let them have hope in Thee who know Thy name” (l. 73)—and the Epistle of James: “your own epistle” (l. 76). Saint James, blazing the brighter with joy at the pilgrim’s answers, asks one more question: What promise does hope make to

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him? In answer to this the pilgrim cites the prophet Isaiah (61.7), describing a land of peace where men shall wear a “double raiment” (l. 92), and then cites the revelation to John (Revelation 7.9), who speaks of the blessed wearing white robes (l. 95). At this all the souls sing out Sperent in te (“Let them hope in you”), the words of the psalm the pilgrim has just alluded to, and another of the lights brightens significantly and moves down to join Peter and James in a joyous dance. Beatrice identifies this as SAINT JOHN THE APOSTLE, he who “lay upon the breast / of our own Pelican” (i.e., Christ) (ll. 112– 113). When the pilgrim learns the identity of this soul, he begins to stare intently into John’s radiance. At this the apostle, reading his desire in the pilgrim’s mind, recognizes that the pilgrim is recalling the legend that John had been taken bodily into Heaven. John assures the pilgrim that his body has turned to dust on earth, where it will stay until Judgment Day. Only two figures, John says, were ever taken into Heaven “clad in double robes” (i.e., soul and body, l. 128), and John charges the pilgrim to make this clear to the world when he returns. As John stops speaking, the circling dance stops, and the heavenly souls are silent. When the pilgrim looks to his side, he finds suddenly that he cannot see Beatrice—in fact he can see nothing at all. Rather than allow the pilgrim to fret about his blindness, Saint John begins to question him in Canto 26 about the third and greatest of the theological virtues, love, at the same time assuring him that Beatrice herself will return the pilgrim’s sight when the time is right. The pilgrim rests content with the promise that Beatrice will restore his eyes and assures John (alluding to Revelation 1.8) that the beginning and the end—the “Alpha and Omega”—of his love are in God. John pushes for a more specific answer: What was it that compelled Dante to seek this kind of love? The pilgrim answers that both the arguments of philosophy and the authority of scripture are behind his virtue of love. The good, he argues, draws the human will to love, and the greater the good we comprehend, the greater will be our love for it. When we recognize the supreme good of God, we love that good most intently. The arguments of Aristotle, the Old Testament book of

Exodus (33.17), and the opening of John’s own Gospel declare these truths about love. Still John asks whether any other influences draw the pilgrim to the love of God. The pilgrim now seems to understand what it is John wants him to say and answers that the existence of God’s creation, the miracle of the pilgrim’s own life, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the hope of heavenly bliss, and the divine grace represented by Beatrice herself, who rescued him from his sinful error, all inspire his love of God. At this all the souls in this sphere, including Beatrice, sing, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” (l. 68), upon which the pilgrim’s sight is restored by the penetrating glance of Beatrice’s own eyes. When he regains his sight, the pilgrim notes that a fourth brilliant radiance has joined the souls of Peter, James, and John. Beatrice identifies this fourth luminosity as the soul of ADAM, the first man. The astounded pilgrim greets his progenitor courteously, and Adam, as are the other souls of Paradise, is able to read the pilgrim’s desires in the mind of God. He thereby discerns four questions that the pilgrim wishes answered: How long ago was Adam created, how long did Adam live in the Earthly Paradise, what was the true reason for God’s anger with him, and what language did he speak in Paradise? Adam chooses to answer the questions in a different order from the one posed. He reveals first that it was not the eating of the fruit itself that caused God’s wrath but the transgression of the boundaries God had set. As for the date of his creation Adam says that he was in Limbo for 4,302 years before Christ rescued him, and he had lived on earth for 930 years. Adam then tells the pilgrim that speech is natural to human beings, but that the form of speech changes over time, for no human creation is eternal; therefore the language Adam spoke is long extinct—was indeed extinct, he says, before the building of the Tower of Babel divided and scattered human beings according to their different languages. Finally Adam asserts that his entire time in Eden lasted only about six hours. At the close of Adam’s discourse as Canto 27 opens, all the host of Heaven sing out a hymn of glory to the Trinity, which creates such joy in the pilgrim that he feels the entire universe is smiling.

Paradiso But that smile does not last long, for as the pilgrim turns his eyes back to the four brilliant souls before him, the soul of Saint Peter begins to glow with a fiery red tint, and all of Heaven grows silent. Peter tells the pilgrim not to marvel at his change, for the other souls will soon change in the same way, as Peter now begins a bitter attack on his successors in the papal office. In Christ’s eyes the papal seat is empty, says Peter, for the current pope (Boniface) has turned the Roman see into a sewer. At this Beatrice returns red as well, and all the other souls of Heaven change color in a manner resembling the eclipse that darkened the sky at the Crucifixion. Condemning the greed of recent pontiffs, Peter invokes the names of early martyred popes—Linus, Cletus, Sixtus, Pius, Calixtus, and Urban—declaring that they did not shed their blood so that the Bride of Christ (the church) might be wooed with gold. Nor did he and the other early popes intend that the church should be divided into pro- and antipapal factions, so that the pope would actually make war upon fellow Christians. In particular Peter is enraged that his own image is being used as the seal for indulgences and for repeals of excommunications. Nor does Peter see any improvement in the successors of Boniface—the sons of Cahors (John XXII) and of Gascony (Clement V). Such shepherds are like wolves in disguise, destroying their own sheep (ll. 55–57). Peter ends his tirade with the prophecy that God will not allow these conditions to continue much longer and then, as Cacciaguida had, he instructs the pilgrim to speak the truth about these things in his poetry when he returns to his worldly life. At this the souls of this eighth sphere ascend as a group to the Empyrean Heaven like rising snowflakes, and the pilgrim watches them until they are out of sight. Then Beatrice directs him to look downward once again. Gazing down at the earth, the pilgrim notes that he now is over a different part of the globe than when he had previously looked down, having revolved some 90 degrees in this sphere, and he sees the route that ULYSSES had sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules. But now his eyes desire only to look upon the beauty of Beatrice, and as he looks back into her eyes, their power carries him upward into the last sphere, the Primum

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Mobile. This sphere seems to have no variations by which to mark his location—all parts of it appear equal to the pilgrim. Beatrice explains that this sphere is a pure and direct reflection of the mind of God. It contains the other spheres and is itself contained by God’s love. This sphere is the starting point of time and moves all the other spheres. At this point Beatrice suddenly changes her tone and condemns the human sin of greed, which as Circe did turns men into beasts. This should not surprise the pilgrim, she says, because the world has no governor to enforce the laws of a just commonwealth. She ends the canto by prophesying the time when the movements of the heavens will produce a legitimate temporal ruler who will set the world on the right path again. When Beatrice has finished her complaint, the pilgrim looks into her eyes, those enticing gems that first drew him to love her. He sees a bright radiance reflected there, and when he turns, he sees a dazzling point of light, surrounded by nine brilliant spheres spinning around the point at varying speeds, more slowly the farther they are from the intense point. Beatrice explains that all of nature and the heavenly order depend upon this tiny point of light. The closest circle, she explains, moves at great speed in direct response to God’s love. But the pilgrim is confused: What he sees seems to him to be the reverse of the universe as he has seen it, where God surrounds the heavens and the overarching Primum Mobile is the swiftest-moving sphere, and closest to God. Beatrice tells him that the ideal picture he now sees differs from the physical universe. There the greater the bliss, the larger the physical body. In the ideal model it is the proximity to the bright point, the source of love, that corresponds to the intensity of love and speed of movement of each sphere. Thus the innermost sphere of the ideal model corresponds to the outermost sphere of the physical universe. His mind now clear, the pilgrim looks again at the model and sees a vast number of sparks showering from the brilliant rings, all singing, “Hosanna” to the stationary point of brightness. Sensing his new confusion, Beatrice explains that these sparks are the innumerable angels who guide the spheres of Heaven. The first two orders of angels, closest

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to God and most conversant with his absolute love, move the two innermost circles of the model, corresponding to the outermost spheres of the physical universe (the Primum Mobile and the sphere of the fixed stars). These are the Seraphim and the Cherubim, who move most swiftly as they try to become more godlike themselves. The next sphere, that of Saturn, is directed by the Thrones, angels associated with justice. In all three orders the angels’ bliss derives from their vision of God, and their love follows from that bliss. The second triad of angels constitutes the Dominions, Virtues, and Powers, whose love moves the spheres of Jupiter, Mars, and the Sun. Finally Principalities, Archangels, and Angels move the spheres of Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, respectively. Beatrice ends the canto by explaining that Dionysius the Areopagite was right in his catalog of the angelic orders, and that Gregory the Great (whose list differed from that of Dionysius) was mistaken. This should not surprise the pilgrim, however: After all, Beatrice tells him, Dionysius had his information directly from Saint Paul himself, who had actually visited the heavenly realms. When she has finished speaking, Beatrice stands silent for a moment, staring into the point of light that is God’s image. Dante uses a celestial image of the Sun and Moon balanced on either horizon to suggest the brevity of her contemplation. She then tells the pilgrim that she will answer the questions about the creation that she is able to read in his mind. She tells him first that God’s creation of the angels was not motivated by any attempt to increase his own goodness, which was already infinite, but was rather a pure act of love. As for when the creation took place, Beatrice says that there was no before or after for God, but time came into being at the moment of creation. She describes the creation as threefold—form, matter, and form mixed with matter were created simultaneously, as was the cosmic order. Beings of pure act (the angels) were placed high in the universal order, with objects of pure potentiality placed at the bottom. Beatrice then takes issue with Saint Jerome’s belief that the angels were made centuries before the creation of the rest of the universe—reason

should recognize that God would not have left the angels with nothing to do for such a long time. Thus the ordered universe was created at the same time as the angels. In fact, Beatrice continues, in less time than it would take the pilgrim to count to 20, some of the angels rebelled against their creator, incited to do so by the presumption of Lucifer. The other angels moved immediately to perform their loving tasks. They recognized God as the source of their intellect, and their vision was increased by God’s grace. Beatrice tells the pilgrim that grace is received in direct proportion to the zeal of one’s love. Having said this, Beatrice moves on to criticize some of the foolish teachings promulgated on earth. First, she says, those who claim that angels, like human beings, possess understanding, memory, and will are mistaken. Since angels are always in direct communication with the mind of God, wherein all things are contained, angels have no need of memory themselves. Such doctrines, she says, are put forward by theologians who are less concerned with truth than with demonstrating their own cleverness. Some of these are preachers who contradict or deliberately twist Scripture itself to conform to their own conception of truth. The parishioners thus become like sheep fed on air. Christ told his apostles to go forth and preach the truth, not garbage, Beatrice says, but now preachers are more interested in putting on a good show. The parishioners suffer for relying on these preachers, and the preachers themselves get fat on the proceeds they make off of the sale of false indulgences in which the foolish people trust. Returning to the topic of angels from what she calls a digression, Beatrice reveals that the quantity of angels is so great that the human mind cannot comprehend the number. She cites the book of Daniel as an authority on the great number of angels and further asserts that each individual angel receives and responds to the love of God in his own unique way. Beatrice ends Canto 29 by marveling at the magnitude and power of God, who divides his goodness among countless angelic “mirrors” who reflect that goodness back and yet remains whole and indivisible in Himself.

Paradiso Commentary With the beginning of Canto 23 Dante is moving into the Upper Heavens and to mark that transition opens with a simile designed to create suspense and expectation. The mother bird who watches for the dawn is Beatrice, waiting for the appearance of Christ. In this Dante borrows from an ancient Christian tradition (going back to a famous fourthcentury dawn song by the Latin poet Prudentius) that associated the dawn with the coming of Christ. In the simile Beatrice is represented by the bird, thus putting the pilgrim in the position of the nestling, eagerly awaiting what in this case is the spiritual nourishment of the vision he is about to see. The maternal image of Beatrice not only recalls the beginning of the previous canto, in which Beatrice protected the pilgrim as a mother would, but also foreshadows the appearance later in this canto of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the ultimate Christian mother figure. The vision of the Church Triumphant (the saved Christian souls in Heaven) granted to the pilgrim here as he enters Upper Heaven parallels the vision of the Church Militant (the souls of the blessed living in the world) granted him upon his entrance into the Earthly Paradise at the peak of Mount Purgatory (Canto 28). Both are symbolic visions. There the allegory took the form of a glorious pageant. Here the Church Triumphant is presented as a dazzling light show, in which Christ himself is a luminous sun, whose light is reflected from the thousands of stars that are the souls of the blessed. Beatrice calls these blessed spirits the “fruit / harvested from the turning of these spheres” (ll. 20–21). The image suggests that these souls had been a part of the Church Militant in the world of time, under the turning spheres, and now having reached maturity have been “harvested” into the Church Triumphant in Paradise. This distinguishes them from the angels, who have always been citizens of Heaven and part of the Church Triumphant. The image also recalls the pilgrim’s previous comments about predestination and about the influence of the spheres on human behavior— like the influence of Gemini on his own genius discussed in Canto 22. The spheres—transmitters of God’s providence—shaped these souls for good,

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and those who have been harvested were those who responded positively to that shaping power. Beatrice calls Christ the “wisdom and power,” alluding to 1 Corinthians 1.24, in which Paul says that “to those who are the called,” Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” In this role as God’s power and wisdom Christ had opened the door to Heaven that had been closed to the human race since the time of Adam’s sin. Even the faithful who lived prior to the Incarnation had to wait in Limbo until Christ’s Crucifixion opened the way for them—a situation graphically illustrated for medieval Christians by the image of the Harrowing of Hell. The pilgrim’s experience of the blinding vision of Christ and the Church Triumphant is the kind of mystical ecstasy that cannot be comprehended by the rational mind. We should recall Dante’s caveat at the beginning of the Paradiso, when he asserted that he would write “as much of Heaven’s holy realm / as I could store and treasure in my mind” (Canto 1, ll. 10–11), implying that much of the experience could not be recalled to his memory. The pilgrim’s vision of Christ in triumph seems to be a transforming one, fitting him for the new experiences he will be facing in the upper spheres of Heaven. At the beginning of Canto 21 Beatrice had hidden her smile from him, warning him that his worldly eyes could not bear its glory in these heights. Now that the pilgrim has borne the dazzling vision of Christ, his eyes have been acclimated to the heavenly sights he is about to witness. Thus in line 48 Beatrice now invites the pilgrim to look upon her smile. Once again the pilgrim’s experience here parallels the events upon his entrance into the Earthly Paradise, for there Beatrice withheld her smile from him as a punitive measure, until he felt true remorse for his sin. When she finally lifted her veil and revealed her smile in Purgatory, the pilgrim found its beauty indescribable: Who, he asks, even having drunk from the Muses’ well of Parnassus, “could find with all of his poetic gifts/ those words that might describe the way you looked,” (Canto 31, ll. 140–143). Similarly now that he sees her smile here in Paradise, he declares that its beauty is beyond the power of any human expression: no poet inspired by Polyhymnia (the

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Muse of sacred poetry) or any of her sister Muses could articulate even “one one-thousandth / part of the truth about her sacred smile” (ll. 58–59). In the later part of the canto as the brilliant light of Christ has withdrawn, the pilgrim looks upon the blessed souls of the Church Triumphant, now using the metaphor of a garden to describe them. Thus the apostles are described as lilies (l. 74) and the Virgin Mary (conventionally) as a rose. Later she is called a “living star” (l. 92)—a term borrowed from the liturgy, in which she is called the “morning star” and also the “star of the sea.” Her brightness and virtue exceed all others’ in this Heaven, just as her holiness in life was superior to that of all other souls. At this point it is worth remembering the positive exempla on each terrace of Purgatory, which always included first an example of virtue from the life of the Virgin. We should remember as well that it was Mary herself who initiated the chain of love—moving through Saint Lucy to Beatrice to Virgil—that turned the pilgrim from the wood of error he was lost in at the beginning of the Inferno and onto the road to salvation (Inferno 2, l. 94). There is, therefore, no exaggeration in the pilgrim’s claim that he prays to the Virgin morning and night. The flaming torch that descends from Heaven and surrounds the radiance of the Virgin is an angelic messenger—almost certainly the angel Gabriel—reenacting the annunciation itself and symbolically crowning the Virgin as queen of Heaven by encircling her with a crown of light. When she, too, ascends heavenward, the flames of the blessed souls’ radiances all lean after her like children bereft of their mother—an image that recalls the canto’s opening image of the mother bird. The souls all unite to sing the Regina coeli (“O queen of Heaven”), the beginning of an antiphon sung in praise of the Virgin Mary during the Easter liturgy. As the canto concludes, Dante extols the souls who have won their true reward here through the tears they shed and the worldly treasure they shunned during what he calls their exile in Babylon (ll.133–135). In his allusion to the captivity of the Jews in Babylon Dante means to suggest that for human beings, worldly life is a form of exile from

our true home in Paradise. Then finally the pilgrim’s eyes fall upon the bright radiance of the figure who will become the main spokesman of this sphere in the next canto. By the introduction of him as “the one who holds the keys” (l. 139) it is clear that the figure is Saint Peter, to whom in Matthew 16.19 Christ had said, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (NRSV). Canto 24 opens with the image of a banquet— presumably the marriage feast of the lamb (described in Revelation 19.7–8), which the blessed share in Heaven. At the same time of course it is a banquet of knowledge (the metaphor Dante used for the title of his philosophical Convivio). The blessed partake of this banquet, and what is served is the knowledge imparted by God’s revelation. It is this revelation that the pilgrim burns for, and of which he craves just a crumb or a drop to slake his thirst. Beatrice asks the souls who remain in the eighth sphere to share a drop with the thirsty pilgrim. The brightest light now left in this sphere is that of the apostle Peter. Allegorically this reenacts the situation of the church after the ascension of Christ and the assumption of the Virgin, leaving Peter in authority as the rock on whom the church would be built. The radiance of Saint Peter responds to Beatrice’s request by burning with the joy of love and dancing a circle around her three times (the number 3, as always, suggesting the Holy Trinity). The music that accompanies Peter’s action is so beautiful and holy that the pilgrim’s mind cannot contain it. In words recalling the medieval Scholastic categories of the psyche Dante says that his fancy—that part of the mind that receives the images perceived by the senses—could not comprehend the image of that music; nor could the memory store that image (and here he reiterates the difficulty he lamented in the previous canto, ll. 10–11). Nor finally can he find language to describe the experience (ll. 25–27). Like the typical mystical experience, the pilgrim’s fictional experience is ultimately ineffable. Surely it is no surprise that Saint Peter, the keeper of the keys to Heaven, stands at this point as a final hurdle to be negotiated before the pil-

Paradiso grim can enter the Empyrean Heaven. Nor is it surprising that this last obstacle takes the form of an examination: In the fifth canto Beatrice had established a major theme of the Paradiso when she explained how the brilliance of heavenly souls was proportionate to their love, which was in proportion to their vision (that is, their knowledge). The pilgrim’s vision has been refined through eight spheres of Heaven (perfected, as it were, by the vision of Christ in Canto 23), and now he has reached the stage of understanding that allows him a glimpse of the vision of the blessed—a crumb from their banquet, as the opening image of this canto represented it. Now he has reached the point, as at the end of a course of study, when it is time for his examination. Beatrice requests that Peter conduct the first part of what will prove to be the pilgrim’s entrance examination to Heaven, the part concerning the question of faith. The rest of the examination will concern the other two theological virtues—hope and love—and will be conducted by Saint James and Saint John. In lines 46–51 the pilgrim begins to ready himself mentally for the questions he is about to be asked, comparing himself to a bachelor preparing for a university disputation. The remainder of the canto is modeled on the kind of public examination or disputatio required of university candidates who might be pursuing the master’s or doctoral degree in theology—something that allegorically the pilgrim is about to receive. In such an examination the master would pose questions to the student, who was required to offer arguments for both sides of a proposition, without drawing conclusions (it was the master’s privilege to make a final judgment in the matter). Here the pilgrim answers more directly, though Saint Peter does make a final determination of the value of his answers. The pilgrim must first define faith, and he does so by paraphrasing Hebrews 11.1, saying it is “the substance of those hoped-for things / and argument for things we have not seen” (ll. 64–65). When Peter asks the pilgrim to define substance and argument, the language becomes more difficult for modern readers, moving into Scholastic discourse. Substance is defined by Scholastic philosophers as “that which exists in itself.” Because human beings

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in this world desire the eternal joy of Heaven but have no direct experience of that joy, their hope is based on their faith—which is material or substantive, as the concept of the unseen Heaven is not. Argument, that which is used to prove one’s case, consists of evidence in questions of worldly knowledge but in questions of religion must consist of faith. This may sound specious, but in fact medieval scholarly arguments were nearly always deductive and generally used authority as evidence. In religious argument the Scriptures were the most significant authority, and what gave them that authority was faith. The rest of the pilgrim’s answers concerning faith are quite straightforward, though it should be pointed out that what he seems to consider his clinching argument—that if the world was won to the Christian faith without the miracles associated with the scriptures, then that in itself would be the greatest miracle of all—was one that Saint Augustine had used in The City of God (22.5). When he has finished, the souls all sing the fourth-century hymn Te deum laudamus (“We praise you, O God”), famous as the hymn written by Saint Ambrose and sung at his conversion of Saint Augustine. Sung here as the pilgrim is about to enter the Empyrean, the same hymn was sung in Canto 9 of the Purgatorio, when the pilgrim entered the gate of Purgatory. Clearly Dante thought of it as a liminal kind of hymn, marking transition into a new stage of life. Saint Peter then officially approves the pilgrim’s answers, praising “The grace that lovingly / speaks with your mind” (ll. 118–119), thereby giving the praise to God’s grace that has revealed these truths to the pilgrim, rather than to the pilgrim himself. The creed that the pilgrim recites opens like the traditional Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, expressing belief in one God, the loving creator of the universe, who spoke through the Old Testament prophets, and belief in the Holy Trinity as revealed in the New Testament. Parts of Dante’s creed, however, reflect Aristotelian philosophy— as, for example, when he calls God the unmoved mover (l. 131), an impersonal Aristotelian description. Further he asserts that God can be proved by physical as well as metaphysical arguments—once

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Sts. Peter and James with Dante and Beatrice, from Canto 25 of the Paradiso, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

again thinking of Aquinas’s arguments for the existence of God taken, for the most part, from Aristotle (ST 1, q. 2. a. 3). In loving joy at the pilgrim’s understanding of faith and as a sign of welcome to this exalted sphere, Saint Peter then circles the pilgrim three times, as he had done with Beatrice at the beginning of the canto. Canto 25 is the canto focusing on the theological virtue of hope, and Dante begins it with the expression of a very personal hope: his own dream that the poetic accomplishment of his Comedy will bring about the end of his exile and his return to Florence to receive the poet’s laurel crown at the site of his own baptism in San Giovanni. While this hope is certainly sincere—Dante expresses the same wish both in the Convivio (1.3.4) and in his lyric poetry—his expression of it here also has a

thematic purpose in characterizing the pilgrim as filled with the virtue of hope. The Saint James who greets the pilgrim here is the biblical brother of Saint John the evangelist. With John and Peter he formed the inner circle of Christ’s disciples in the Gospels. According to tradition James had preached in Spain but had returned to Jerusalem, where, according to Acts 12.2, he was executed by Herod Agrippa on the eve of the Passover in 44 C.E. Legend held that his body was conveyed miraculously to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, where it was buried. Saint James’s tomb at Compostela was, in Dante’s time, the most popular pilgrimage site in Europe after Rome. The questions on hope James puts to the pilgrim (What is hope? What are its sources? Does the pilgrim himself possess the virtue of hope?) are similar to those Peter had posed with regard to

Paradiso faith. When Beatrice answers the third question for him, it is in part because by answering the question truthfully, the pilgrim might seem to betray a lack of modesty. The truth of what she says about the pilgrim’s abundant faith is evident by that hope expressed in the opening of the canto. But in part her answer could be read allegorically: In her role as divine revelation her knowledge of the pilgrim’s hope probably exceeds even his own. Her answer also recalls the allegory of the second canto of Purgatory (Canto 2, l. 46), in its allusions to the pilgrim’s mortal life as Egypt, the earthly bondage of the flesh, and his heavenly deliverance as Jerusalem, the promised land of freedom from the corruption of the world. The pilgrim’s definition of hope is derived from the influential Sentences of the 12th-century philosopher and theologian Peter Lombard. As usual it also reflects the influence of Thomas Aquinas, who wrote that “the impulse to hope comes from Grace alone, while our merits are, as we know, a necessary condition of the fulfillment of our assurance of salvation” (ST 2.2, q. 17, a.1). As for the sources of hope the pilgrim offers the Scriptures, in particular the Psalms and the epistle of Saint James. It seems that one of the reasons Dante associated James with hope is the generous reward promised to the faithful in the New Testament epistle of James: “Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom he has promised to those who love him?” (James 2.5). Although modern scholars attribute the epistle to James the less, the brother of Jesus, rather than James the great, the apostle, it seems clear that Dante and his contemporaries did not make that distinction. When James asks what promise his hope makes to his soul, the pilgrim again cites the Scriptures, in particular referring to Isaiah 61.7, where the prophet guarantees each man a double portion in his homeland. Dante reads this as a “double raiment” (l. 92), interpreted allegorically (or anagogically) as possessing both soul and body in Heaven. The pilgrim then adds an allusion to the white robes of the elect depicted in Revelation 3.5 and 7.9–17. Again Dante sees these robes allegorically as the resurrected, purified body, glowing white like

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the spirit—a double raiment. This is the pilgrim’s hope: a full and purified life (comprising both body and spirit) in the eternal bliss of Heaven. In this Dante relates this canto with Canto 25 of the Purgatorio, in which Statius gives a long explanation of the relationship of the soul and body, discussing the manner in which the soul becomes the form or generative force of the body. This unique and interdependent relationship is behind the kind of longing expressed in Canto 14, where the souls look forward to the joy they will feel when they are reunited with their bodies after the resurrection of the flesh. Perhaps it is the mention of his revelation that draws the bright soul of Saint John down to join his fellow apostles. As the disciple whom Jesus loved, John represents the last and greatest of the theological virtues, love (caritas). His association with love is clear from Beatrice’s description of him as “the one who lay upon the breast / of our own Pelican” (ll. 112–113). Because in medieval times the pelican was thought to nurse its young by tearing its own breast and feeding its young with its own blood, thereby sacrificing itself to give them life, the bird became a traditional symbol of Christ, whose sacrifice of his own blood gave eternal life to all the human race. At the end of the canto the pilgrim stares penetratingly at Saint John, hoping apparently to see whether the legend is true about Saint John’s ascending bodily to Heaven. This was a popular legend in the Middle Ages, based apparently on Christ’s comment to Peter concerning John at the end of John’s Gospel: “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?” (John 21.22). The legend was so popular in Dante’s time that a fresco in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, attributed to Giotto, depicted John rising bodily from the grave into Heaven. Dante here wants to put an end to this myth and has John himself declare that only Christ himself and his Blessed Mother ascended directly to Heaven in bodily form. Of course this assertion contradicts another widespread belief in the Middle Ages, that the Old Testament figures Enoch and Elijah had also ascended bodily. Dante apparently is of the belief that the two prophets ascended not into Heaven itself but into the Earthly Paradise.

232    Paradiso When the pilgrim turns from the brightness of Saint John’s splendor to speak with Beatrice he finds that he is blind, as he might be after looking directly into an eclipse. This frightens and startles him, for he says, “I could not see, and she / so close to me, and we in Paradise!” (ll. 138–139). No doubt the pilgrim remembers Beatrice’s chiding him in Canto 22 when he showed fear at the shout of the souls in the sphere of the contemplatives. Here as there the pilgrim must trust in his guide and in the goodness of Heaven. The pilgrim’s blindness as Canto 26 begins seems to be the result of his intense gaze into the radiance of Saint John in the previous canto. But this odd detail, following so soon after his vision of Christ had prepared his eyes for the brilliance of Beatrice’s smile in Canto 23, must have some allegorical significance. Some scholars have suggested that the blindness signifies the pilgrim’s ignorant supersti-

The Heaven of the Fixed Stars, from Canto 26 of the Paradiso, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

tion in believing the legend about Saint John’s body. Others believe that it suggests the traditional association of love and blindness. Neither of these seems particularly satisfactory given the pilgrim’s position here, about to enter the highest Heaven. The words of Beatrice at the beginning of Paradiso 5 must be applicable here. Beatrice had asserted that the brightness of the souls in Heaven is a reflection of the degree of their love, and that this love “proceeds / from perfect vision which, the more it sees, / the more it moves to reach the good perceived” (ll. 4–6). Perfect vision is equated with perfect understanding, and understanding of the good moves the will to love the good. If the pilgrim suddenly loses his vision here at the point of achieving perfect love and experiencing the perfect goodness of God, the allegorical significance must be something of consequence. Since it is Beatrice who will ultimately restore the pilgrim’s sight, as Ananias did for Paul in Acts 9.17–19, the allegory must also involve her. In this canto the pilgrim will be examined on the virtue of love. Essentially the situation in these first lines recapitulates allegorically Dante’s love of Beatrice, which ultimately led him to the love of God. In his Vita nuova Dante told the story of how the love of Beatrice came to him first through his eyes—“the gates / she entered with the fire that burns me still” (ll. 14–15). But his first love of her was lustful and selfish, until he is able to devote his poetry strictly to the praise of Beatrice, and finally to the depiction of the departed Beatrice as the embodiment of God’s love and the giver of blessings. Here the pilgrim recapitulates that story, his blindness recalling his initial lust, his restored sight reflecting the blessing conferred by the sainted Beatrice—here in her role as Divine Wisdom itself. Unlike the examinations of his faith and hope, this examination does not require the pilgrim to define love. Instead John asks him only what it is he loves and why. The pilgrim’s answer depends heavily on Aristotle, and on Virgil’s discourse on love in the 17th canto of the Purgatorio. Human beings are disposed to love the good. When the good is perceived and understood by the intellect, the will is inclined to love. When the intellect recognizes the highest good, the will is compelled to love that

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St. John joins the other saints and Dante and Beatrice, from Canto 26 of the Paradiso, by William Blake. From Illustrations to the Divine Comedy of Dante, by William Blake, London: National Art-Collections Fund, 1922.

highest good, God. Citing Scripture as well, the pilgrim asserts that both reason and revelation compel him to his love of God, and in this he follows the practice of Scholastics like Saint Thomas Aquinas. When the souls of this sphere hear the pilgrim’s answers, they sing, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” in the very words used by the citizens of Heaven to praise God in both Isaiah 6.2–3 and Revelation 4.8. When his eyesight is restored, the pilgrim finds a fourth radiance along with Saints Peter, James, and John. Upon learning that this is Adam, the father of all humankind, the pilgrim approaches him with great respect and humility, addressing him as the “one and only fruit / who was created ripe” (ll. 91– 92)—no doubt with an allusion to the forbidden fruit. In the cantos parallel to this one—Inferno 26 and Purgatorio 26—the pilgrim had displayed a similar respectful attitude toward the chief figures of

those cantos. In Inferno 26 the pilgrim is cautioned by Virgil to speak respectfully to the great soul of Ulysses, who, as had Adam, had transgressed the boundaries set by God and attempted to sail to Purgatory himself, and ultimately to regain the Earthly Paradise that Adam had lost. In Purgatorio 26 the pilgrim had rejoiced to find his poetic father, Guido Guinizelli, on the terrace of the lustful. The pilgrim praises Guinizelli’s love lyrics, which he says “for as long as our tongue serves for verse, / will render precious even the ink you used” (ll. 113–114). Looking back from this canto on love and the pilgrim’s own blindness, it is even clearer that Guinizelli’s kind of love poetry celebrates a misdirected love that mistakes the beloved for the highest good. Adam discerns four questions in the pilgrim’s mind, but he answers them not in the order the pilgrim conceived them but rather in the order of

234 Paradiso their importance. He begins with the most critical question, concerning original sin. It was not simply the eating of the fruit (a sin of gluttony) that led to God’s wrath; rather it was the transgression of the boundaries set by God (a sin of pride similar to that of Lucifer—or Ulysses) that begat all other sins and led to Adam’s expulsion from Eden. Adam says that he lived to be 930 years old (Dante takes this figure from Genesis 5.5) and had waited in Limbo for 4,302 years before Christ rescued him—an act that would have occurred with the Harrowing of Hell in 34 C.E. by medieval reckoning (in this Dante follows the world chronology established by Saint Eusebius in the early fourth century). Recalling the fictional date of the Comedy as 1300, Adam must have been created some 6,498 years in the past. The language that Adam spoke no longer exists, the patriarch says, for it was the product of human reason, and nothing created by man can last eternally. In this Dante actually corrects his own earlier opinion, expressed in De vulgari eloquentia (1.6.5– 7), where he had asserted the popular opinion that Adam’s language was God-given, and that after the confusion of human language and scattering of the tribes at the Tower of Babel, it was continued in the Hebrew language. In that earlier work Dante had held that Adam’s first spoken word was el (the Hebrew word for “God”). Here Adam says that he first spoke I—a vowel pronounced “yah” (as was the first syllable of the name of God, Yahweh) as well as a Roman numeral indicating the number 1, symbolizing the unity of God. Finally Adam tells the pilgrim that his life in Eden lasted barely six hours, from sunrise until just after midday. While there had been a number of guesses concerning this question among Scholastic theologians, Dante deliberately chose the briefest estimate, which was that suggested by Peter Comestor (whom the pilgrim had met in Paradiso 12, l. 135). No doubt Dante saw the allegorical significance in the idea of Adam’s expulsion from Eden occurring at the same hour as Christ’s Crucifixion. Further as Dorothy Sayers first pointed out, the pilgrim himself stays in the Earthly Paradise for exactly six hours in the Purgatorio and, as the pilgrim’s second view of the earth from this height

will reveal, he also stays in this heaven of the fixed stars for six hours. Canto 27 opens with a great cry of praise, the liturgical Gloria Patri (“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost”), sung by the souls of the eighth sphere apparently in celebration of the pilgrim’s passing his examination and anticipating his graduation into the Primum Mobile, from which he will enter the Empyrean Heaven. In this way the Canto parallels Canto 27 of the Purgatorio, at the end of which Virgil crowns the pilgrim Dante lord and master of himself as he is about to enter the Earthly Paradise—an act that allegorically prefigures this one. This joyous tumult soon abates as Saint Peter steps forward, red with shame and righteous anger, to denounce the papacy of Dante’s time. His tone is the harshest yet used in the Comedy against the princes of the church, as the thrice-repeated “that place of mine” (ll. 22–23) thunders the first pope’s indignation at the one he accuses of usurping his place, Boniface VIII. Some scholars have seen an allusion in these lines to the thrice-repeated phrase in the scriptural condemnation of false and hypocritical religion in Jeremiah 7.3–4. Certainly the tone is similar, and like Jeremiah, Peter must be seen to be speaking the word of the Lord: Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.” (NRSV)

Saint Peter evokes the names of six early popes (i.e., bishops of Rome). His own successor, Saint Linus, who succeeded him circa 64 C.E., was, according to legend, beheaded by Saturnius in 76 or 79 C.E. The next pope, Saint Cletus (or Anacletus), was martyred during the persecutions under the emperor Domitian in 90 C.E. Sixtus I was bishop under the emperor Hadrian circa 115 to circa 125 and was reputed to have been martyred, though there is no evidence of how he died. The same is true of Pius I, bishop from circa 140 to 155. Calixtus I held the see from 217 to 222 and may have been martyred under Alexander Severus—according to legend,

Paradiso he was killed in an uprising by being thrown into a well. He was succeeded as bishop of Rome by Urban I, who held the office until 230. Urban was purportedly martyred as well, according to the popular legend of Saint Cecilia, but this has no basis in historical fact. As far as Dante knew, however, all of these figures were early martyrs who died for the integrity of the church, and thus as examples they serve Peter’s purpose, which is to complain that he and these other early popes did not martyr themselves so that their current successors might divide the church (into Guelph and Ghibelline, Black and White) and make war on their fellow Christians. Peter’s reference to the papal keys’ being used as the heraldic emblem on Boniface’s battle flag may be intended to recall the 27th canto of the Inferno, wherein Guido da Montefeltro described the machinations of Boniface VIII against the Colonna, his fellow Christians on whom he waged war with Guido’s assistance. What bothers Saint Peter even more is the use of his own image as a “seal to stamp / those lying privileges bought and sold” (ll. 52–53). Here he refers to the use of the seal on indulgences issued by the church, on benefices that popes might have conferred in exchange for cash, and on documents reinstating—again in exchange for cash—the excommunicated. In language Milton was later to emulate with his condemnation of contemporary clergy through the mouth of Saint Peter in Lycidas, Dante’s Peter calls the princes of the church wolves masquerading as shepherds and laments the coming of two more venal popes—John 22 (of Cahors) and Clement V (of Gascony)—who will continue to drag the church down. Dante has alluded to the corruption under both of these popes before, including most recently John (in Paradiso 18), the sitting pope at the time of this canto’s composition. Peter foresees that God’s providence will soon set the church right, as it intervened to allow Scipio Africanus to defeat Carthage. The allusion to this hero of republican Rome suggests that Dante expects the restoration of order in the world to be achieved through secular Imperial intervention. As Peter ends his discourse, he repeats Cacciaguida’s exhortation to the pilgrim to repeat what he has heard here once he returns to his mortal life.

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As in the earlier case this charge provides Dante with a kind of divine justification for his censure of the corrupt papacy. Indeed as John Ciardi points out, the fact that the charge is presented as from Saint Peter himself “is itself the ultimate denunciation” (304). After Peter’s speech the souls of the eighth sphere ascend to the Empyrean and are described as snowflakes falling upward. This is the first of a number of such “inverted” images that will appear in the last cantos of the Comedy—in particular it looks forward to the model of the inverted universe in Canto 28. It seems likely that these inversions are meant to suggest a new perspective of the pilgrim: that he has begun to see things from God’s spiritual perspective as opposed to the limited physical human perspective. Now left with Beatrice in the constellation of Gemini, he once more looks down at the world, to find that he is currently directly above the Strait of Gibraltar. When he gazed down in Canto 22, he was above Jerusalem. The heavens have revolved 90 degrees since he has been in the eighth sphere—one-quarter of a complete revolution. Hence the pilgrim has been in this sphere for six hours (one-quarter of a full day)—the same length of time that Adam spent in the Earthly Paradise. Beatrice now ascends with the pilgrim to the last sphere, the Primum Mobile, or first mover—a sphere without any distinguishing heavenly bodies or points of reference, so uniform in its construction that the pilgrim has difficulty knowing where he is. Beatrice tells Dante that the only “where” here is in the mind of God. She goes on to lecture the pilgrim on the nature of time: The movement of the heavenly bodies is used to measure time, she tells him, but the speed and passage of time itself are determined by this last sphere that encircles all the others. Without its movement there would be no day and night, no orderly progression of the seasons, no stability in the cosmos. Abruptly in line 121 Beatrice’s tone changes to righteous anger. Her motivation is unclear, though part of the purpose of her tirade is structural: Her attack on the weaknesses of the human race here at the end of this canto balances the anger of Peter against the papacy in the beginning. But it might

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be assumed that her description of the perfectly ordered cosmos causes her to lament the failure of human beings to act as part of nature’s ordered harmony. Her denunciation of the human will plays on themes developed earlier in the Comedy. As Virgil had described sin as the misdirection or perversion of love in Purgatorio 17, so Beatrice claims that “The blossom of man’s will is always good” (l. 124), but that greed turns his will from the good. In a much-discussed tercet (ll. 136–138), Beatrice asserts that the innocent whiteness of the newborn human soul turns to sinful blackness through the misdirected love of earthly baubles, symbolized by the daughter of the sun, the enchantress Circe, who in classical mythology turned men into swine. This lack of control is no surprise, Beatrice asserts. Recalling Marco Lombardo’s discourse in Purgatorio 16, Beatrice blames this lack of personal control on the absence of secular authority: “There is no one on earth to govern you / and so the human family goes astray” (ll. 140–141). Once again we may be reminded of the end of Purgatorio 27, where the pilgrim Dante, his will remade in Purgatory, becomes lord of himself—without true justice in society, individuals must become their own moral authority. Canto 27 ends with a very obscure image. In a radical understatement Beatrice suggests that before the inaccuracy of the calendar makes January a springtime month, God will send a temporal leader to restore the world. Dante knew that the Julian calendar (in which the year was 365 1/4 days long) was just inaccurate enough to add a full day to the solar year every century. Thus in about 9,000 years January would become the first month of spring. (This inaccuracy was corrected by the Gregorian calendar in the 16th century.) In saying this help will occur in less than 9,000 years, Beatrice probably means to imply that it will happen very soon. The image of the universe granted the pilgrim in Canto 28 is first reflected in the eyes of Beatrice, a logical process when we remember her allegorical function as divine revelation. What is revealed to the pilgrim is absolute radiance focused in an infinitesimal point, surrounded by nine concentric spheres. The image is a surprisingly mathematical

representation of the spiritual universe. God as an immobile mathematical point suggests his perfect unity, his transcendence of space and time, and his nonmaterial nature. Contemporary readers may be struck by the similarity between Dante’s intense point, which is the source and foundation of the universal cosmos, and the gravitational singularity that modern scientists propose as the source of the big bang. Beatrice acknowledges that the “model and the copy” (l. 56) of the universe are at variance. In this essentially Platonic canto, the model or Platonic form of the universe is the ideal that exists in the mind of God, while the physical universe is a copy of that unchanging absolute ideal form that is the ultimate reality of the universe. In what Beatrice calls the “world of sense”—less real than the spiritual world—the spheres are encompassed by God rather than revolving around him. Beatrice explains the problem to the pilgrim by showing the parallel between the size of the physical sphere and the intensity of love in the angelic intelligences who surround God in the model. Thus the Seraphim, who respond to God with the greatest love and circle closest to him in the model, are the intelligences who move the Primum Mobile, largest and swiftest of the physical spheres, and the one closest to God. The myriad angels who fly like sparks among the revolving spheres of the ideal model universe sing “Hosanna” (as the heavenly host did at the beginning of Canto 7). As Beatrice catalogs the angelic orders, she divides them into three triads (as always, Dante symbolically represents the Trinity). The first triad, associated with the Primum Mobile and the spheres of the fixed stars and Saturn, consists of the Seraphim—the order of angels nearest to God and most associated with divine love (as they have been earlier in the Comedy, most recently in Canto 21, l. 92); the Cherubim—the order most closely linked with vision or knowledge (as they are in Canto 11, l. 39); and the Thrones— the order associated with divine justice (see Canto 9, ll. 61–62). In his brief commentary on these three orders Dante addresses a matter of some debate among the Scholastic theologians: Does the knowledge of God precede the love of God, or vice

Paradiso versa? In asserting that the angels first know God and then love him, Dante comes down on the side of Thomas Aquinas and the Dominican scholars, as opposed to Saint Augustine and the Franciscans. But this tenet has been reinforced by Dante throughout the Paradiso, beginning with Beatrice’s comments in the opening of Canto 5, where she stresses that her brightness results from her vision (or understanding), which “the more it sees / the more it moves to reach the good perceived” (Canto 5, ll. 5–6): That is, knowledge is first, and then the will follows the perception of goodness that knowledge has grasped. The remainder of the heavenly hierarchy (the Dominions, Virtues, and Powers moving the spheres of Jupiter, Mars, and the Sun; followed by the Principalities, Archangels, and Angels associated with Venus, Mercury, and the Moon) is derived from the order proposed in the mystical fifth-century De coelisti hierarchia (“On the Celestial Hierarchy”), in medieval times attributed to the first-century Dionysius the Areopagite, whom the pilgrim has seen in Canto 10 (ll. 115–117). Pope Gregory the Great had presented a different hierarchy of angels in his Homilies on the Gospel (32.48), and that order had been followed by Brunetto Latini in his Trésor, and by Dante himself in the Convivio (2.5.6). But Aquinas had followed the Pseudo-Dionysian order, and Dante here corrects himself. He mentions that when Gregory reached Heaven, he smiled at his error. It is not difficult to imagine Dante smiling as he here rectifies his own previous assumptions. Dionysius must be right, he implies, since his information was obtained directly from Saint Paul himself. Dionysius was converted by Paul in Acts 17.34 and was purported to have been the first bishop of Athens. Thus he was well known to Paul, who (as alluded to several times in the Comedy) claims to have visited Heaven in 2 Corinthians 12.1–4, and who therefore could have provided Dionysius with the correct angelic hierarchy. The first three tercets of Canto 29 describe Beatrice as she is gazing upon the infinitesimal image of God. In an elaborate simile Dante describes the brief duration of her gaze as equal to that instant during the spring equinox when the Sun and Moon are momentarily directly opposite each other on

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the horizons, as one is setting and the other rising. It is an elaborate way to imply that her pause was momentary, but in its evocation of God’s vast creation, from horizon to horizon, the description sets the stage for Beatrice’s learned discourse on the creation of the angels that follows. Beatrice focuses on the angels as God’s first created beings, and Dante draws much of the theology of angels from Aquinas’s Summa theologica. God created the angels in the Empyrean at the beginning of time. He did not create them to increase his own goodness, Beatrice asserts, since God already embodies all possible goodness. Rather God intended for these created beings to reflect his goodness and light and thereby be able to say, “I am” (l. 15)—that is, to be conscious of their own existence and thus share God’s love. As Aquinas puts it: He brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be represented by them; and because His goodness could not be adequately expressed by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of divine goodness might be supplied by another. (ST 1, q. 47, a. 1)

Beatrice goes on to describe the creation as simultaneous. God, dwelling in eternity—so that the concepts of “before” and “after” have no meaning for him—willed the entire created universe into being in one instant. Like so many things in the Comedy, creation itself was threefold: God created creatures of pure form (spirit without matter, i.e., the angels), he created pure matter (the undifferentiated material substance of which the earth was made, containing the potential for all beings and elements of the world), and he created matter mixed with spirit (by which Beatrice refers to the heavenly spheres, in which form and matter are united). These distinctions Dante takes from Aristotle’s De anima (2.2.414). The perfect harmony of the cosmos came into being in the same moment of its creation, so that the three categories of being mentioned earlier are ordered according to a scale beginning with the angels, who as sheer spirit or intellect are creatures of pure act. They are placed above the rest

238 Paradiso of creation and endowed with the ability to move and influence it. At the other end of the scale of being is pure potentiality, those material things of the earth that cannot act themselves but must be acted upon. Between these the heavenly spheres exist as both act and potential, moved by the angels and moving the events on the earth. Beatrice acknowledges that one influential theologian, Saint Jerome, had written that the angels were created some centuries before the rest of the universe. This she firmly denies, declaring, first, that it is against Scripture, referring perhaps to Genesis 1.1 (“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.”) or Ecclesiasticus 18.1 (“He who lives forever created the whole universe”) (NRSV). But, she adds, Jerome’s opinion is against reason as well: Angels were created to be the movers of creation. Without the spheres of Heaven to move they would have nothing to do, and God would not have allowed such purposelessness in his perfect creation. Dante had used this argument before, in the Convivio, and had taken it chiefly from Aristotle. Immediately after their creation, Beatrice continues, a portion of the angels presumptuously refused to recognize their dependence on their loving creator. In less time than it takes to count to 20, Lucifer and his rebel angels fell to the earth, opening up Hell, for God could not for one instant abide the presence of such imperfection in Heaven. Dante’s logic here must in some sense depend upon the conversation between the pilgrim and Adam in Canto 26: If all creation was instantaneous, and if Adam was in Paradise for six hours before being cast out, then Satan must have been tempting Eve for some time prior to the end of that sixth hour, and so must have fallen from Heaven very shortly after the creation. In this Dante again follows Aquinas, who stated that “the devil sinned at once after the first instant of his creation” (ST 1, q. 63, a. 6). The other angels, Beatrice explains, recognized and loved their creator immediately. The angels had been created with illuminating grace inborn—the grace whose function is to suggest good thoughts to the intellect. This grace is directly proportionate to the love with which each individual soul receives it. In the case of the rebel angels that love turned

away from God’s grace. The others, through the eager and loving response that drew them to God, were granted for that single virtuous act the sanctifying grace that ultimately binds their will to desire only what God himself wills. Once again Aquinas is the source of much of Dante’s theology here: Man’s soul and an angel are ordained alike for beatitude: consequently equality with angels is promised to the saints. Now the soul separated from the body, if it has merit deserving beatitude, enters at once into beatitude, unless there be some obstacle. Therefore so does an angel. Now an angel instantly, in his first act of charity, had the merit of beatitude. Therefore, since there was no obstacle within him, he passed at once into beatitude by only one meritorious act. (ST 1, q. 62, a. 5)

Beatrice, having mentioned Jerome’s mistaken notion concerning the creation of the angels, now refutes the mistaken notion that angels possess memory, and from this she digresses into a more general condemnation of theologians and preachers who promulgate false teachings unsupported by Scripture. In the previous canto Saint Peter had denounced the corrupt papacy; here Beatrice attacks corruption among the lower clergy. Some of these false preachers are well-meaning but mistaken about the truth; others, and these are far guiltier, do not even believe their own sermons but preach unfounded falsehoods in order to impress the simple parishioners and so profit by their illdeserved reputation. Nor, Beatrice asserts, are the people themselves innocent when they believe such lies: “the fact that they / are ignorant does not excuse their guilt” (ll. 107–108), she says, for there are certain fundamental tenets of the faith that they are obliged as Christians to know. Returning to the subject of angels from what she calls a digression in line 127, Beatrice expounds upon the number of angels. She cites the book of Daniel—in whose vision of Heaven “A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him” (7.10, NRSV)—to show that the number of angels is beyond human conception but adds, with no little awe, that each individual angel receives God’s grace and returns his

Paradiso    239 love in his own personal manner and measure. This should not surprise the reader. The need for a variety of created beings in order for God to manifest the fullness of his goodness is clear in the preceding citation from Aquinas (ST 1, q. 47, a. 1). From the very beginning of the Paradiso Dante has stressed the individuality of the souls of Paradise, even while recognizing that each soul’s or angel’s will is in perfect accordance with God’s. The pilgrim’s apparently irrelevant question about the spots on the Moon in Canto 2 led to the explanation that the spots are the result of the varying brightness of the individual angel intelligences who populate the sphere. Here Beatrice assures the pilgrim that no two angels partake of God’s love in precisely the same way. Despite this incomprehensible number of beings reflecting God’s light and love, however, God remains complete and infinite. This is the final demonstration of Virgil’s assertion in Purgatorio 15 that while earthly goods are the subject of envy because what one person possesses limits what others can have, the true Good is different:

the Heaven of the pure light of intellect, love, and goodness, and she promises the pilgrim that he will see the two great hosts of Heaven—the elect and the angels—just as he will see them on the Day of Judgment. As he enters the Empyrean, the pilgrim is surrounded by radiance so that all he is able to see is light, but Beatrice assures him that the light is merely preparing him for this highest realm of Paradise. His eyesight soon returns, and he has an astounding vision of a river of light, flowing between two colorful banks. From the river brilliant sparks fly up to radiant flowers on the shore, then flash downward again into the river. Beatrice instructs the pilgrim that this vision is only a symbol of the truth and tells him to drink from the glowing river. Like a baby hungry for his mother’s milk, the pilgrim thrusts his face into the river and lets his eyes

just as much ardor as it finds, it gives:  the greater the proportion of our love, the more eternal goodness we receive; the more souls there are above who are in love  the more there are worth loving; love grows   more, each soul a mirror mutually mirroring.   (ll. 70–75)

The Empyrean:   Mystic Rose and Thrones of   the Blessed (Cantos 30–33) Synopsis Gradually the model universe begins to fade from the pilgrim’s sight as Canto 30 opens, and as it disappears his eyes are drawn once more to look on Beatrice. Her beauty is now beyond human ability to describe, and Dante the poet admits defeat: Only God himself could do justice to the radiance of Beatrice, and it is the grand “clarion” of God that now begins to draw Dante’s great theme to its end. Beatrice tells the pilgrim that they have now arrived at the highest Heaven, the Empyrean itself,

The Empyrean, from Canto 31 of the Paradiso, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

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drink in the light. As he does so, the river changes from a stream to a great circle, and like masqueraders removing their masks, the sparks show themselves to be the countless angelic hosts of heaven, while the flowers reveal themselves as the souls of the blessed. The circumference of light, more than large enough to girdle the sun, is the reflection of a single ray of the light of God’s love, mirrored off the convex surface of the sphere of the Primum Mobile. All about him the pilgrim sees great petalshaped sections of what appears to be an enormous rose of light. On the petals are tiers of seated souls—all the souls of the blessed sit in stadiumlike rows that expand as the petals rise higher. Despite the great size of the Mystic Rose, the pilgrim is able to see clearly all parts of it, even the distant highest tiers—for here, where God rules directly without any mediator, the laws of nature do not apply. Beatrice takes the pilgrim into the rose and instructs him to look about at the thousands of seats filled by saints of the Church Triumphant. Not many remain empty. One vacant seat is decorated with a crown, and Beatrice informs the pilgrim that this seat is kept for the emperor HENRY VII OF LUXEMBOURG, who will attempt to save strife-torn Italy before its time. He will be thwarted, Beatrice says, by the duplicitous Pope Clement V, who will publicly promise Henry support but privately seek his ruin. The bolgia of simoniacs awaits Clement, she says, where upon his death he will push the soul of Boniface VIII deeper down into the fiery hole reserved for avaricious popes. As Canto 31 opens, the pilgrim is gazing at the great white rose in which are seated all the souls of the blessed—the Church Triumphant that is the Bride of Christ. The angelic host is in constant motion, like a great swarm of bees, flying between God and the rose of the blessed, to whom they give the joy of God’s love. Never in their flight do they impede God’s light, which shines on everything in the universe according to its own merit, and Dante prays—from his earthly situation as he writes these verses—that God’s light will shine down on the storm of his times. The pilgrim compares his amazement at this view of Heaven to that of a barbarian seeing the glory of Rome for the first time. He is as joyous as a pilgrim who has reached the sacred

destination of his pilgrimage, and as the pilgrim does, he wonders how he will be able to describe the sight when he returns home. Having gazed quickly at the structure of Paradise, the pilgrim turns toward Beatrice with a question but finds she is gone. In her place is an older man with the love of a father in his attitude and the joy of the blessed showing on his face. The pilgrim asks where Beatrice has gone, and the old man tells him that it was at Beatrice’s request that he has left his place in the rose to be the pilgrim’s final guide to his ultimate goal in God. As for Beatrice, the old man points her out in her glory, seated in the third tier of the rose. The pilgrim pronounces an apostrophe to her, thanking her for taking him from bondage to sin into freedom and praying to be worthy of her when his soul parts from his body. Beatrice hears his prayer, looks down upon him, and smiles. It is his last glimpse of her in the poem—she turns from him and focuses again on the eternal light of God. The old man now tells the pilgrim to gaze higher in the rose, to the Virgin Mary, and reveals himself to be the Virgin’s most faithful lover, Saint Bernard. It is through the intercession of the Virgin that the pilgrim will reach his ultimate vision of God. As he raises his eyes to the highest point of the rose, he beholds a splendor that outshines all the others. She shines like the sun and a thousand angels fly around her throne. The Virgin smiles on all around her, and when Bernard sees the pilgrim’s eyes fixed upon her, he turns his own eyes toward her with a burning love. In a state of mystic rapture Saint Bernard assumes his duties as the pilgrim’s guide by identifying the figures of the blessed seated in the mystic rose. Directly beneath the throne of the Virgin, Bernard points out the soul of our first mother, Eve. In the third tier, immediately beneath Eve, is Rachel, the favored wife of the patriarch Jacob, and seated directly next to her is Dante’s beloved Beatrice. In a line straight down from Rachel are Sarah, Rebecca, Judith, Ruth, and a long line of Hebrew women who, Bernard explains, form a dividing line between the two major groups in the rose. To one side of this line, where the seats are all filled, sit the souls of those who had believed in Christ to come (i.e.,

Paradiso    241 the Old Testament Jews). On the other side, where Beatrice sits and where some seats remain vacant, are the blessed souls who believed in Christ after the dawn of the Christian era. Directly opposite Mary, seated at the highest point on the other side of the rose, is Saint John the Baptist, and beneath him is formed a line of Christian saints, beginning in the second tier with Saint Francis, then Saint Benedict, Saint Augustine, and others, forming a dividing line on their own side of the rose. Bernard now points out another dividing line among the blessed: Halfway down the tiers of the stadium is a line that divides the upper half from the lower half of the rose. The lower half, Bernard explains, is filled with children who died before reaching the age of reason (usually assumed to be seven years). Bernard reads a question in the pilgrim’s mind—why are some children seated higher in the rose than others, when none was able to exercise free will? The hierarchy is not simply created by chance, Bernard says, but is a reflection of the portion of grace each young soul received through God’s inscrutable will. Bernard goes on to explain that before Christ’s coming only the faith of the parents was required for a child to enter this place. Later circumcision was necessary for males. Now, however, baptism is required (and the unbaptized infants are confined to Limbo). Now Bernard directs the pilgrim to look directly at the Virgin Mary, who alone can prepare him to look upon Christ. As the pilgrim gazes upon her, the angel Gabriel spreads his wings before her and reenacts the Annunciation, and the souls of the blessed throughout the Mystic Rose sing a response to Gabriel’s “Hail Mary” with joyous faces. Bernard explains to the pilgrim what is happening and then proceeds to identify other notable souls among the blessed. To Mary’s left on the top tier of the arena is Adam, father of mankind; to her right sits Saint Peter, father of the holy church. Next to Peter sits John the evangelist, while on the other side of Adam is seated Moses. Across from these, in the tier beside John the Baptist, is Saint Anne, mother of Mary, seated directly across from Peter and singing “Hosanna” as she admires the face of her daughter. On the other side of the Baptist, directly opposite Adam, is Saint Lucy, Dante’s

The Queen of Heaven, from Canto 31 of the Paradiso, by Gustave Doré. From Purgatory and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary, M. A., from the original of Dante Alighieri, and illustrated with the designs of Gustave Doré, New York: P. F. Collier, 1887.

patron saint, who began the action of the Comedy by sending Beatrice down to Limbo to find help for her beloved pilgrim. Having finished his description of the rose, Bernard informs the pilgrim that the time is growing short, and his journey is almost finished: It is time, Bernard says, for the pilgrim to turn his eyes directly to the radiance of God. But first, so that the pilgrim does not assume that he obtains this grace through his own power, Bernard asks the pilgrim to join him in a prayer to the Virgin Mary. Saint Bernard opens the final canto with a sublime prayer to the Virgin that spans the first 13 tercets. He praises Mary as the most exalted of all earthly beings, as the mother of God, as the font of charity in Heaven and on earth. He prays for the pilgrim, recounting his journey through Hell and Purgatory to this height of Heaven and asking that

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Mary help him to “dispel the mist / of his mortality” (ll. 31–32) and grant him the power to lift his gaze to the final vision of God. Bernard points also to Beatrice and the entire host of the blessed, all of whom pray to the Virgin to help the pilgrim to his goal. And, looking beyond the end of the Comedy, Bernard prays that Mary will keep the pilgrim on the right path once he has returned to his mortal life. Mary responds with a loving look at Bernard and then looks upward into the light of God, indicating her acceptance of Bernard’s prayer. Bernard then signals the pilgrim to look upward, even as the pilgrim already turns his eyes toward the Eternal Truth. Now, as so often previously in the Paradiso, Dante expresses his inability to describe what he sees. Returned to the physical world and looking back on his experience, the narrator suggests that the experience of his divine vision was like waking from a dream, when the substance of the dream disappears, but the strong passions the dream invoked remain. The poet prays to the Divine Light to grant him some flash of memory that will enable him to pass along a hint of what that supreme vision was like. In a memorable image Dante describes how the light of God contains all things as if bound together in a single volume, and how the created universe consists of the scattered leaves of that book (ll. 85–87). All things are bound together by love into a unity within the Divine Light. As he gazed on the living light, the poet recalls, it seemed to shine as three great circles of different colored light, like coextensive rainbows—the first reflected the second, and both reflected the third, in a demonstration of the mystery of the Holy Trinity. At last staring into the second circle, he seemed to see the image of a man but could not conceive how that was possible. Suddenly a flash of insight struck his mind like lightning, and he understood the mystery. In the end his vision and understanding fail—his mind can take in no more. But his desire and his will are momentarily in complete accord with the will of God. His will turns, he says, like a perfectly balanced wheel, along with the will of God, which turns the heavens and the stars.

Commentary Canto 30 begins with another sweeping cosmic image, this time in the form of an extended simile involving an astronomical description of the dawn. The pilgrim’s situation in the Primum Mobile is like that of someone on Earth 6,000 miles from the point at which high noon is occurring. The circumference of the Earth in Dante’s day was estimated to be 20,400 miles, so that 90 degrees or one-quarter of this distance—the longitude at which the Sun would be dawning—would be 5,100 miles away. A point 900 miles farther would be about an hour before dawn. Dante suggests that an hour before sunrise, the sky begins to lighten, so that gradually the stars start to fade, until even the brightest is finally obscured by the Sun. In the same way the spheres of the model universe he has been watching begin to fade, as gradually the pilgrim is taken into the Empyrean Heaven. The simile equating this last step of the journey to the dawn implies a kind of rebirth and new life for the pilgrim here in the actual presence of God. The increasing beauty of Beatrice as she has risen higher into the heavens has been a recurring theme of the Paradiso, and here in the Empyrean, her eternal home, her beauty has reached infinite proportions, so that Dante’s repeated occupatio— his protestation that her beauty is beyond human description or comprehension—now rings true. All the verse he has written praising Beatrice since he met her at the age of nine culminates here, where no higher praise is possible. Dante indeed has fulfilled the vow he had made at the end of the Vita nuova nearly 30 years before: “I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman” (Musa, Vita nuova, 649). Allegorically of course Beatrice as divine revelation reaches perfection in the mind of God itself, and that mind encompasses the Empyrean. For the same reason Beatrice now seems about to withdraw as the pilgrim’s guide. In words that recall Virgil’s last words to the pilgrim in Purgatorio 27, she introduces him into the Empyrean “with the tone and gesture of a guide / whose task is done” (ll. 37–38). Perhaps the pilgrim, now directly in God’s presence, no longer needs divine revelation—perhaps he will, at this point, see directly into the mind of God, as the spirits of Heaven have throughout the Paradiso.

Paradiso Beatrice promises the pilgrim that he will see the two great hosts of Heaven, the angels and the blessed. Saint Benedict had informed the pilgrim in Canto 22 that his desire to see the saint in his own mortal body would be granted in the highest Heaven, and in fact that is precisely what is about to take place. Beatrice tells him that “one host”—that is, the blessed—will appear to him “as you will see them on the Final Day” (l. 45), that is, the Last Judgment when the resurrection of the flesh shall occur. The vision of the river of light must have been suggested to Dante by Daniel 7.10 (“A stream of fire issued and flowed out from his presence”) and Revelation 22.1 (“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb”). Beatrice makes it clear, however, that the river is only a symbol of the truth. The last step through which the pilgrim’s vision (always equated with knowledge in the Paradiso) will be perfected involves his drinking from the river of light. In a scene of spectacular synesthesia the pilgrim places his face in the river and drinks in the light with his eyes. This act of course parallels the scene in the Purgatorio (Canto 31) in which the pilgrim drinks from the river Lethe in preparation for his entry into the Earthly Paradise. This scene is the fulfillment of that one, as the baptism and new birth implied by the drink from the river of light prepare the pilgrim for his presence in the highest Paradise of all. At once the pilgrim’s vision is clarified, and he sees that the river of light (suggesting the linear flow of time) is in reality a great circle (without beginning or end, suggesting eternity). His eternal vision now allows him to see that the sparks flying from the river are members of the angelic host, and the flowers along the riverbanks are the souls of the blessed. His emphasis on his clarified vision in lines 95, 97, and 99—where he repeats the phrase “I saw” three times—suggests his new ability to mirror the light of God directly rather than see that light as reflected in Beatrice’s eyes, and in line 97 he makes an appeal directly to God (rather than a muse or other intermediary) for the inspiration to describe the Mystic Rose.

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The Mystic Rose—a vast stadium a thousand tiers high with a base circumference wider than the Sun—allows the pilgrim to see the blessed in their true forms, in bodily shape as they will appear after the Last Judgment (since in the Empyrean there is no past or future, it seems likely that the blessed here are always in their true state). Since time does not exist here, other natural laws do not apply, and the pilgrim can clearly see the faces of blessed souls at any part of the great rose. The fact that nearly all the seats are filled implies that the end of the world must be close at hand. Beatrice draws the pilgrim’s attention to one of these empty seats—one over which a crown is set in preparation for the arrival of the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VII. The fictional date of the Comedy, 1300, is some eight years before Henry became emperor, so the seat would of course still be vacant. Dante is writing these last cantos of the Paradiso in 1321, eight years after Henry had died. Thus Dante can have Beatrice accurately predict how Henry will go to Italy in 1310, with the public support of Pope Clement V and with the intention of restoring Italy to Imperial rule (and therefore, from Dante’s political view, to peace and justice, and the rule of law whose loss Marco Lombardo had lamented in Purgatorio 16). And she can also easily predict how Henry’s mission will fail, largely because of opposition by the duplicitous Clement, who will die in 1314, a mere eight months after Henry’s untimely demise—because, as Beatrice asserts, “God will not permit him to stay long” (l. 145) after such treachery. She reminds the pilgrim of what he has already seen in bolgia three of the eighth circle of Hell: Clement will fall to that depth and replace his predecessor, Boniface VIII, as the chief sinner among the simonists (Inferno 19). The huge arenalike rose that fills the pilgrim’s view of the Empyrean is a rich symbol for Dante’s readers familiar with the love literature of the High Middle Ages, in particular the vastly influential Roman de la Rose. Here, as in that text, the rose is a symbol of love, but Dante’s white rose denotes not earthly love but the pure caritas of divine love. The rose is also associated with the Virgin Mary, who reigns as queen of Heaven in this coliseum. Further roses are a reminder of Christ’s Passion,

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and on the fourth Sunday of Lent it was customary for the pope ceremoniously to bless a golden rose. All of these connotations are suggested by the Mystic Rose which serves here as the site of ultimate human fulfillment in communion with God. The angels, who continually fly like bees between God and the rose, carry love from God to the rose and back again. They are diaphanous beings, who allow all the souls in the rose an unobstructed view of God even while they fly above them. When the pilgrim turns to face his guide, he finds that Saint Bernard has replaced his dearest Beatrice. The saint remains unnamed while Dante takes the time to pay a final tribute to his beloved guide. No longer the symbol of divine wisdom or revelation, she has returned to her proper place in the rose, just below the Virgin, and the pilgrim expresses his gratitude for the grace that she gave him in leading him out of the slavery of sin and worldliness into the promised land of Paradise— from “bondage to freedom,” as he says in line 85, recalling the song of deliverance sung by the souls on the shore of Purgatory (Purgatorio 2, ll. 46–48). In this last praise of Beatrice the pilgrim changes from the formal voi to the familiar tu in addressing her (l. 81), a change that marks the end of her allegorical function and her return to the role of Dante’s very human beloved, now in eternal bliss. Saint Bernard now becomes Dante’s final guide, for the last three cantos of his pilgrimage. Saint Bernard, 12th-century abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux, was the driving force behind the Second Crusade and the most influential theologian of his time. An adviser to popes, Bernard was instrumental in the condemnation of Peter Abelard’s hyperrational approach to theology. Bernard was known for his mysticism and for his passionate devotion to the Virgin Mary. Allegorically Bernard seems to represent contemplation and mystical experience that will give the pilgrim his ultimate joy in union with God. As the author of visionary treatises himself, Bernard is the ideal figure to guide the pilgrim here. Further since he was well known for his zealous devotion to the Virgin, he can assist the pilgrim in his approach to her. The Virgin is the worthiest of the souls in this sphere, and her prayers on behalf of the pilgrim would be the most effective

in achieving the special grace God may grant in response to the prayers of the worthy, the grace that will gain the pilgrim his final vision of God. This canto begins and ends with images of awe and wonder. In lines 31–42 Dante compares his amazement at viewing the Mystic Rose with that which the barbarians must have felt upon first beholding the monuments of ancient Rome (in particular he mentions the Lateran, the greatest of imperial residences, supposed to have been given to Pope Sylvester by the emperor Constantine). Later (ll. 103–111) Dante compares his awe at viewing the Virgin Mary to that of a pilgrim from a faroff land—Croatia—who travels to Saint Peter’s in Rome for the first time and sees the Veronica (the famous relic handkerchief bearing the image of the face of Christ). Both images underscore the journey of the Comedy as a pilgrimage, an arduous journey rewarded in the end with an experience of the holy place that fills the pilgrim with awe and veneration. All earthly pilgrimages are merely shadows of this, the heavenly goal of all true pilgrimages. As Canto 32 opens, Saint Bernard graciously assumes the role of Dante’s guide. Essentially what he provides is a visual tour around the tiers of the paradisal arena, while he and the pilgrim stand in the golden center of the rose. He points out Eve directly below Mary and refers to the “wound” (l. 4) opened by Eve—the original sin of disobedience—and to Mary’s role in the healing of that wound by giving birth to Christ. This binary relationship between the two women was a widespread motif during the Middle Ages. Five other Hebrew women are mentioned as being seated in the line below Mary, and these include two of some significance in the Comedy. In the third row sits Rachel (second wife of the patriarch Jacob), who had appeared in the pilgrim’s dream in Purgatorio 27 and 28. There she had symbolized the contemplative life, while her sister, Leah, represented the active life. It was from her seat at Rachel’s side that Beatrice was called to save the pilgrim Dante in Inferno 2, l. 102, and here in the eternal rose the pilgrim sees his Beatrice sitting just to the right of Rachel (as we find later, this means that Beatrice is seated just two seats directly beneath the throne of Saint Peter).

Paradiso Below Rachel are other women in the direct line of Christ’s genealogy. First is Sarah, Abraham’s wife and the mother of Isaac. Commentators have suggested that Dante had in mind here the passage in Hebrews 11 in which it is noted that a huge progeny sprang from Sarah’s presumed barrenness, and Sarah is cited with Abraham as the first who “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them” (Hebrews 11.13). To Sarah’s left, we soon discover, are all those who, as she had, had believed in the Christ to come and are now in bliss. In traditional typological readings of Genesis Sarah was often seen as a figure of the church. Also in this same line is Rebecca, wife of Isaac and mother of Esau and Jacob (and thus all of Israel). Beneath her is Judith, heroine of the apocryphal book of that name and an emblem of beauty and courage as well as sincere faith. It was Judith who beheaded Holofernes, the Assyrian general laying siege to her native city of Bethulia—an incident that forms one of the exempla of arrogance brought low on the terrace of pride in Purgatorio 12. Finally in the seventh rank down sits the “great-grandmother of the singer” David, the psalmist and king from whose line the Messiah was to come. This is Ruth, the Moabite woman whose pious devotion to her husband’s mother ultimately won her a place among God’s chosen and made her great-grandmother of God’s anointed king. As Bernard explains, all of these women, like Sarah, believed in the Christ to come, and they form a line that divides the rose into two parts: The seats on their left are the pre-Christian faithful, and these seats are completely filled (Christ has already come). To their right are the seats intended for those who believe in the incarnate Christ. This section of the rose contains an equal number of seats, but some are empty—though not a great many. As did other medieval writers, Dante seemed to expect the end of the world to occur comparatively soon, and the pilgrim himself is striving to attain one of these still-vacant seats. When the last seat is filled, Bernard implies, the Empyrean Heaven will be complete, and Judgment Day will occur. Continuing his circuit of the rose, Saint Bernard directs the pilgrim’s gaze to the seat of John

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the Baptist directly opposite Mary. As did Mary’s, John’s life straddled the pre-Christian and Christian eras, and because his execution at the hands of Herod Antipas occurred two years before the Crucifixion, John spent two years in Limbo before Christ took him to his seat in bliss (l. 33). The line of saints below John forms the other boundary that divides the rose in half. Each saint in this line is familiar from earlier mention in the Comedy, and their ranked positions probably imply a certain value judgment as well. Saint Francis, whose life most closely emulated that of Christ himself (see Canto 11), has the highest-ranking seat, just below John’s. Saint Benedict, founder of Western monasticism, represents contemplation here and is seated directly opposite Rachel on the women’s side. Beneath Benedict is Saint Augustine, most important of the early theologians and defender of orthodoxy against Manicheans, Pelagians, and other early heretics. This greatest of the doctors of the church sits directly opposite Sarah, type of the church. As Edmund Gardner notes, the implication seems to be that theology (Augustine) is important, but that the contemplative life (Benedict) is superior to it, and that the imitation of Christ (Francis) is more blessed still. Dante goes on to deal with the thorny problem of innocent children who fill the lower tiers of the rose. While he had, with perfect orthodoxy, placed unbaptized infants in Limbo, Dante here rather radically places a large number of pre-Christian children in Heaven. This is controversial first because it challenges the general medieval assumption that our risen flesh will compose bodies in the prime of life, not bodies in childhood or old age, as Aquinas had asserted (ST III, suppl., q. 81, a. 1). Second, as Saint Bernard asserts here, in the early days of human existence, if the child died before the age of responsibility (i.e., seven years), then the faith of his or her parents could guarantee a place here in the rose. After the time of Abraham males needed circumcision to be taken to this realm. Those born since the advent of Christ must be baptized. Bernard’s explanation of the degrees of merit among these children, who are here through no merit of their own, is a difficult one. Using God’s inexplicable preference for Jacob over Esau even in

246 Paradiso the womb in Genesis, Bernard argues (as had the eagle of justice in Canto 19) that God’s election of one soul over another is beyond human understanding. Certainly Dante has Paul’s words from Romans in mind: Even before they had been born or had done anything good or bad (so that God’s purpose of election might continue, not by works but by his call) she [Rebecca] was told, “The elder shall serve the younger.” As it is written, “I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau.” What then are we to say? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” (Romans 9.11–15)

But we must recall that from the beginning of this canticle (Canto 3) Beatrice has stressed the various degrees of beatitude in Heaven, based on each individual soul’s capacity for grace. That capacity is inborn, and therefore, even before the individual soul has performed any willful acts, God is able to assign the infant’s soul to his or her place in the Mystic Rose. Bernard redirects the pilgrim’s gaze back to Mary, telling him that only through her can he be made ready to look directly on Christ. The pilgrim witnesses what is apparently a perpetual reenactment of the Annunciation, with the angel Gabriel singing, “Ave Maria” to the Virgin, and the entire population of the rose singing in response—presumably, they complete the “Hail Mary” prayer begun by the angel. On Mary’s right is Saint Peter, and on her left is Adam. Bernard calls these two souls the two roots of the rose: Adam is the father of all mankind, though here more specifically of those who believed in the Christ to come. Peter is the spiritual father (the first “pope”) of those who believe in the risen Christ. Saint John, inspired author of the Apocalypse, is on Peter’s left, and Moses, inspired author of the law, is on Adam’s left. Directly across from Peter is Mary’s mother, Saint Anne. In what has been interpreted as a touchingly human quality, Anne is the only soul in the rose not looking upward toward God: Instead her gaze is eternally focused on her daughter, in whom she sees the reflected light of God.

Bernard indicates one last significant figure in the rose: Saint Lucy is seated to the left of John the Baptist and hence directly opposite Adam. Virgil reminds the pilgrim that it was Lucy herself, at the bidding of Mary, who first sent Beatrice to Limbo to seek help for the pilgrim’s lost soul (Inferno 2, l. 97). Of course Lucy (symbolized by an eagle in the pilgrim’s first dream) also carried the sleeping pilgrim up the mountain to the gate of Purgatory in Purgatorio 9 (ll. 52–63). The pilgrim’s sight of her here is Dante’s last gesture of thanks to his patron saint. Urging the pilgrim on to complete his journey, Bernard tells him that the time of his “vision” is drawing to an end (l. 139). This word has caused some controversy among readers, since the word vision often has the connotation of “dream.” But it is important that the Comedy not be read as a medieval dream vision. The pilgrim’s dreams in Purgatory (such as the one in which the eagle carries the pilgrim into the sphere of fire in Purgatorio 9) could be interpreted as enigma or coded messages. But from the beginning the pilgrim’s actual journey has been treated as reality. The action of the narrative must be read literally, as well as allegorically (touching all three allegorical levels), in order to communicate the sense Dante intends. Finally refocused on the Virgin herself, the pilgrim is told to pray for her intercession in helping him take the final step of his journey, his gaze at the godhead. Thus at the end of the 99th canto of his great poem, Dante returns to his beginning, at which Virgil tells him that it was Mary’s loving compassion that set in motion the events that were to lead the pilgrim out of his dark wood and into the glory of Heaven (Inferno 2, ll. 94–96). As Canto 99 merges imperceptibly into Canto 100, a spirit of humble prayer surrounds Saint Bernard and the pilgrim as well, and it is their prayer that opens the final canto. The prayer with which Saint Bernard opens Canto 33 has two parts: The first seven tercets are spoken in adoration of the Virgin and are filled with the elaborate praise and antitheses (e.g., “daughter of your son” in l. 1) typical of late medieval Marian devotion. The last six tercets comprise Bernard’s request on the pilgrim’s behalf, that he receive the

Paradiso power to look on God without being overpowered, and that he be able to prevent himself from turning back to sin once he returns to his life in the world. Mary is described as, miraculously, the mother of her own father (i.e., her creator)—both virgin and mother, both humble and exalted. Her own life was so spotless that God himself was willing to enter human life through her. She is extolled as the source of charity that gives people hope, so loving to humankind that she has pity on them even before they ask it of her. So memorable is this prayer that it inspired some of Dante’s first readers to compose in a similar manner: Chaucer opens his “Second Nun’s Tale” (the “Legend of Saint Cecilia”) as well as his later “Prioress’s Tale” with invocations to the Virgin that clearly use Dante’s as a guide, utilizing many of the same images. The remainder of the canto is devoted to the vision of God—a vision (like that of Satan at the end of the Inferno) that readers often find anticlimactic. But one must ask oneself how the fictionalized vision could be anything else. The intensity of a literal vision of the infinite and eternal Supreme Being cannot possibly be expressed in language or even envisioned by the finite human imagination, and Dante makes it clear that he knows this. Still his entire presentation of the fictional vision owes a great deal to genuine mystical experiences as recounted by medieval mystics, including Saint Bernard himself. The American philosopher William James, in his influential study Varieties of Religious Experience, lists four characteristics that mystical experiences have in common. The first of these is that they are always ineffable—they cannot be described in human language. Second the experience has what James calls a “noetic” quality: That is, it imparts some kind of special knowledge to the mystic. Third the mystical experience is passive: It is not in the control of the mystic himself; nor can the mystic return to the experience at will. Finally the experience is transient. It lasts only a brief time and then the mystic must return to the physical world. Dante expresses all of these aspects of his own experience narrated in Canto 33. The ineffability of the experience is underscored in lines 55–57, wherein Dante reminds the reader that he is the poet living and writing in the physi-

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cal world and in the “present”—presumably about 1321 in Ravenna. He has been recounting, here and in the previous 99 cantos, a journey that took place over Easter weekend in the year 1300 and so must recall those events to memory before he can narrate them. The actual vision of God, however, is beyond language, as it is beyond memory. The passionate excitement and joy and love of that moment of ecstasy remain, though he is unable to call them to mind clearly enough to describe it. For this he needs God’s inspiration, and his final invocation in the poem is directly to God himself (without appeal to Apollo or the Muses) in line 67. His words here recall the opening of the Paradiso, in which he says he has seen . . . things that he who from that height descends, forgets or can not speak; for nearing its desired end, our intellect sinks into an abyss so deep that memory fails to follow it. (Paradiso 1, ll. 5–9)

Still Dante must attempt to approach the experience through language, inadequate though that may be. He first describes the insight (James’s “noetic” aspect) concerning the unity of the creation that he perceives in gazing into God’s light. The image of the book is at once most appropriate and lucid. For Dante, the creator of this great book of the Comedy, to see the universe itself as a great book in the Creator’s mind invites a comparison of God to the poet, and of the Comedy to the universal creation. But, as Dante continues, that essential unity in God’s mind is strewn through the various levels of the universe, like the scattered leaves of the book, and thus the universal harmony manifests itself in multiplicity in the physical world. The poet continues by borrowing from Scholastic philosophy the concepts of substance and accident: The term substance refers to a material thing that has existence in itself; accident refers to a quality that exists only as it pertains to a substance. God, perfect in himself, contains all things, whether substance or accident, or the relation of the two, fused together in an undifferentiated unity in his mind.

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As the pilgrim’s vision changes the deeper he looks into God’s light, the light itself seems to change, giving the pilgrim a new insight into the triune nature of God. Dante initially eschews any anthropomorphic attempt to personalize the deity but instead describes seeing three great circles of different colors, but occupying the same space. This is impossible in human understanding, as is the union of the three persons of the Trinity, but as the pilgrim witnesses the sight, it is perfectly true and fitting for God. The pilgrim focuses on the second circle—the circle denoting the second person of the Trinity, the Son—and, gazing hard at it, now makes out a human image (l. 131). Thus Dante’s final vision of God, the final image of the Comedy, is this revelation of the Incarnation of Christ. Dante focuses all his powers on this vision but says he is like a geometrician trying to square the circle—he cannot solve the mystery of how God and man can be united in the same being. Suddenly in an instant of grace that is completely beyond the pilgrim’s control (James’s “passivity”) the pilgrim receives direct understanding of this mystery. That understanding, of course, cannot be expressed nor recalled to memory by the older Dante writing in Ravenna in 1321. Like the vision itself, that flash of understanding was transient (James’s last characteristic); nor can the earthbound Dante revisit that vision. It must be left until his return to the Mystic Rose and his eternal salvation. The 33rd canto, the Paradiso itself, and the entire Comedy conclude as the pilgrim’s intellectual desire and will (the “vision” and “love” that have so often been the subjects of this canticle) move briefly in perfect accord with the love of God as it turns the heavenly spheres. The final line, describing “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” (Canto 33, l. 145), alludes unmistakably to the very first line of the Paradiso, evoking “The glory of the One Who moves all things” (Paradiso 1, l. 1), thus moving the Paradiso full circle, creating a form like the heavenly spheres themselves, or like one of the three circles that symbolize the Trinity in this canto. At the same time the final word of the Paradiso—stars—is the same word that ends both the Inferno and the Purgatorio, thereby unifying all three canticles like the three circles of the Trinity,

or like the single volume in God’s mind that unifies all the scattered leaves of the created universe. The Comedy ends on a quiet note of joy remembered—as the older, experienced Dante looks back over two decades at his ecstatic (imagined) vision— and of joy anticipated—as Dante looks forward to his promised return to the Empyrean Heaven, now having recognized his sin in the Inferno, made satisfaction in the Purgatorio, and gone on to holy living in the Paradiso. The Comedy concluded, the pilgrim will have to return to earth. But only temporarily.

FURTHER READING Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 3 vols. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947–1948. Available online. URL: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ aquinas/summa.html. Accessed 24 July 2006. Barolini, Teodolinda. Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the “Comedy.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. Bergin, Thomas G. Perspectives on the Divine Comedy. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967. Bloom, Harold, ed. Dante’s Divine Comedy. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Botterill, Steven. Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the “Commedia.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Boyde, Patrick. Human Vices and Human Worth in Dante’s “Comedy.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. De Gennaro, Angelo A. The Reader’s Companion to Dante’s Divine Comedy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1986. Durling, Robert M., ed. and trans. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Vol. 1, Inferno. Introduction and notes by Ronald L. Marinez and Robert M. Durling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———, ed. and trans. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Vol. 2, Purgatorio. Introduction and notes by Ronald L. Marinez and Robert M. Durling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Foster, Kenelm. The Two Dantes and Other Studies. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977. Freccero, John. “Introduction to Inferno.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel

Il convivio Jacoff, 172–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Gallagher, Joseph. A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Foreword by John Freccero. Liguori, Mo.: Triumph Books, 1999. Grandgent, C. H., commentary. Companion to the Divine Comedy. Edited by Charles S. Singleton. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. Hollander, Jean, and Robert Hollander, trans. Inferno. Introduction and notes by Robert Hollander. New York: Random House, 2000. Hollander, Jean, Robert Hollander, trans. Purgatorio. Introduction and notes by Robert Hollander. New York: Random House, 2003. Jacoff, Rachel. “ ‘Shadowy Prefaces’: An Introduction to Paradiso.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, 208–225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kleiner, John. Mismapping the Underworld: Daring and Error in Dante’s “Comedy.” Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lansing, Richard H. From Image to Idea: A Study of the Simile in Dante’s “Commedia.” Ravenna: Longo, 1977. Mandelbaum, Allen, trans. The Divine Comedy. Introduction by Eugenio Montale and notes by Peter Armour. New York: Knopf, 1995. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the “Divine Comedy.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. Musa, Mark, ed. and trans. The Divine Comedy. 3 vols. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1984–1986. ———, ed. and trans. Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy: Verse Translation and Commentary. Vol. 1, Inferno: Italian Text and Verse Translation; Vol. 2, Inferno: Commentary; Vol. 3, Purgatorio: Italian Text and Verse Translation; Vol. 4, Purgatorio: Commentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997–2000. Pinsky, Robert, trans. The Inferno of Dante. Foreword by John Frecarro and notes by Nocole Pinsky. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. Quinones, Ricardo J. Dante Alighieri. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Raffa, Guy P. Divine Dialectic: Dante’s Incarnational Poetry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

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Robey, David. Sound and Structure in the “Divine Comedy.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. “Introduction to Purgatorio.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, 192–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante’s “Paradise.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Scott, John A. Understanding Dante. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Singleton, Charles S. Journey to Beatrice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Il convivio (The Banquet) (ca. 1304–1306) Dante’s first major literary undertaking after his exile from FLORENCE (FIRENZE), the Convivio is a long, unfinished work in Italian, intended to introduce philosophy to readers unable to understand the Latin of the philosophers themselves. After an introductory book Dante adds three more, and each of these books begins with one of Dante’s canzoni. While the poems introduce the intellectual concepts to be considered, the prose commentaries that follow interpret the poems and expand on the philosophical ideas. The whole work is conceived of metaphorically as a convivio, or banquet, with each book as a separate course in the meal of which the poem provides the meat while the commentary acts as the bread. The first book indicates that Dante had planned a total of 14 additional books or “courses,” but he was only able to complete four books before deciding to abandon the project, perhaps to devote himself more fully to the COMEDY (though he must also have been working on DE MONARCHIA immediately after giving up the Convivio). It is likely that each of the Convivio’s last 11 books was to be devoted to one of the moral or active virtues as enumerated by ARISTOTLE. This is made apparent by Dante’s promise, in Chapter 12 of Book 1, that his 14th book would deal with the virtue of justice. The Convivio relates directly to Dante’s earlier VITA NUOVA (1295). In that text Dante describes

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how, after the death of Beatrice, he turned his love toward another “gentle lady,” who consoled him in his grief. But in the Convivio Dante asserts that this lady was an allegorical representation of philosophy. Thus the canzoni that introduce the final three books of the extant Convivio all appear to be traditional love poems, but in his commentary Dante approaches them allegorically. In this he seems to owe something to ANICIUS MANLIUS SEVERINUS BOETHIUS’s sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy, in which the imprisoned narrator receives a visit from the personified Lady Philosophy, who consoles him in his sorrow. In the same way Dante represents Lady Philosophy consoling him in his grief over the death of Beatrice. Boethius’s text is structured (as is the Vita nuova) in alternating passages of verse and prose and so in that way may have served as something of a structural model for the Convivio as well. In addition to Boethius Aristotle and MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO serve as major sources for Dante’s philosophical ideas. The Convivio begins with an introductory book in 13 chapters explaining why Dante believes a book like the Convivio is needed, and why he is writing it in the vernacular Italian—a language he argues is perfectly suitable for the discussion of moral and philosophical concepts. So passionate was he about the use of Italian that even as he was working on the Convivio, he seems to have begun writing DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA, a work devoted exclusively to a defense of the vernacular as a vehicle for literary expression. In his second book, Dante begins with his CANZONE Voi che ‘ntendendo (“You who through intelligence move the third sphere”) and in 15 chapters talks about ALLEGORY as he praises Lady Philosophy, touching upon other issues including astronomy, angels, and the immortality of the soul—all topics he would revisit in the Comedy, particularly in the PARADISO. Book 3 provides a 15-chapter commentary on the canzone Amor, che ne la lente (“Love, that speaks to me within my mind”), which focuses chiefly on the beauty and perfection of philosophy and the joy of intellectual activity. The final extant book of the treatise is the longest. Dante devotes some 30 chapters to a discussion of society and ethics, all as part of a com-

mentary on his canzone Le dolci rime d’amor (“The tender rhymes of love”). He focuses particularly on the concept of true nobility (an idea he found was of interest to Boethius, Cicero, and Virgil as well), and on the political justification for the Roman Empire. He would further deal with this topic at some length in De monarchia, a treatise he would go on to finish after abandoning the Convivio. While Dante scholars generally find the Convivio to be Dante’s most significant work between the Vita nuova and the Comedy, the reasons for Dante’s leaving the text unfinished are somewhat obscure. The completed work would have been of enormous length, judging from the first four books—and the 30 chapters of Book 4 may have caused Dante to reconsider whether he wanted to spend his time on his prose philosophical text or on his epic-length poetic Comedy. In the end his emulation of Virgil seems to have won out, pressing him to write a poem in the vernacular to rival Virgil’s Latin epic. Furthermore Dante seems to have become distracted by some of the themes he touched on in the Convivio and was tempted to begin new works—De vulgari eloquentia and De monarchia—inspired by ideas initially put forward in the Convivio. These, too, contributed to his abandoning the earlier work. In any case Dante seems to have wanted to revisit the meaning of Beatrice for his life, rather than exploring philosophy, the “gentle lady” who had replaced her in his thoughts. Thus in the Comedy he returns to Beatrice as his central figure and even at times seems to reject his work in the Convivio. In Purgatorio 2, for instance, CATO OF UTICA berates Dante and the other souls on the shore for wasting time listening to CASELLA perform the canzone Amor, che ne la lente from Book 3 of the Convivio. Later Beatrice corrects Dante’s mistaken opinions about the spots on the Moon (Paradiso 2) and about the angelic hierarchy (Paradiso 27), both of which had been expressed earlier in the Convivio. Despite its unfinished state the Convivio seems to have been relatively popular in the later Middle Ages. There are 30 surviving manuscripts of the text, six of which were produced in the 14th century. An early printed version of the text was published in Florence in 1490. Three more printed editions were subsequently produced in Venice.

Il convivio While in the past English readers may have had difficulty finding a complete translation of the text, two good translations—one by Christopher Ryan and one by Richard Lansing—have appeared in recent years. Citations in my text are to Lansing’s edition.

BOOK 1 Synopsis Dante begins his treatise by quoting Aristotle’s proposition that all men by nature desire knowledge. Some, he says, are unable to achieve this goal through defects in either the body (physical handicaps like deafness, for example) or the soul (being sidetracked by lesser pleasures, for instance). Others may be prevented by external forces, such as the distractions of a busy life, or the fact that one is born in a place without a university or an educated populace. Moved by a generous spirit typical of those who have attained some knowledge, Dante proposes to take the crumbs of learning he has gathered from the foot of wisdom’s table and to pass them along to those less fortunate, who have been prevented from achieving knowledge in the ways he has described. He will, he says, provide a banquet consisting of meat (his 14 canzoni that will begin each book) and bread (his prose commentaries on the poems, which will explain the poems’ treatment of love and virtue). He ends the introductory chapter by entitling his treatise The Banquet and by noting that his commentary on his poetry will be more mature here than in the Vita nuova. Still, he says, he does not disdain his earlier work, because different attitudes and manners are appropriate at different stages of one’s life. Continuing the banquet metaphor in the second chapter, Dante says that at the beginning of a banquet, the servants typically cleanse the bread of impurities. He sets out, therefore, to cleanse the “bread” of his commentary of any impurities it may contain. One such impurity, he says, is the rhetorical error of speaking about himself. Generally this should be avoided, he concedes, but he suggests that sometimes it is necessary to do so: Boethius, for example, speaks of himself in his Consolation of Philosophy in order to clear his reputation and avoid the greater evil of infamy. SAINT AUGUSTINE OF

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HIPPO spoke of himself in his Confessions in order to make available to his readers the greater good of instruction through his example. These, he says, are his own motives: He writes first in order to instruct, and second to prevent the infamy that his passionate love poems might subject him to among those who cannot understand their allegory. Dante continues his discussion of reputation in the third chapter. He does not want his commentary on his poems to open him to worse censure, he says, and then discusses why this could be a possibility. He has been exiled from the “sweet bosom” of his home city of Florence, where he fervently hopes to be able to return and live out his last days. But in his wanderings he has found that the fame resulting from his exile has given people an exaggerated view of his defects. This is because a widespread reputation exaggerates both good and bad characteristics in people’s minds. As fame exaggerates one’s qualities, familiarity diminishes them, Dante continues (Chapter 4). There are three reasons for this: First, most people are immature and judge solely by their senses and so fail to see beyond the surface. Second, some people out of envy defame others. Third all human beings have faults; thus the more intimate one is with others, the more they see one’s shortcomings. Since in his wanderings Dante has made himself familiar with nearly everyone in Italy, many may think ill of him. For these reasons, he says, he has written his text in a lofty style, in order to give it more weight. In Chapter 5, continuing the metaphor of the bread, Dante now declares he must apologize for its substance as well as its impurities. It is made of oats rather than wheat, he says, because it is written in Italian rather than Latin. Indicating that he soon intends to write a treatise on De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the vernacular), he proceeds to contradict the chief point that he ultimately argued in that treatise by proclaiming Latin to be a language far superior to Italian because of the latter’s changeability and Latin’s ability to express ideas in a superior way. Accordingly he indicates that his first reason for using Italian in his commentary is that it is appropriate. Since the commentary is meant to serve the poetry and the poetry is Italian,

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it would not be appropriate for the servant to be superior to that which it serves, as the language of a Latin commentary would be to Italian poetry. Continuing the metaphor of master and servant, Dante states that a good servant must understand his master and argues in Chapter 6 that Latin does not understand the vernacular, or the friends (that is, speakers) of the vernacular. This is because far fewer people are familiar with Latin than with the vernacular. Further a good servant should be obedient, but Dante says in Chapter 7 that Latin would not have been truly obedient to the vernacular of Dante’s canzoni. Such obedience would not be agreeable, because of Latin’s clear superiority to the vernacular. In addition Latin could not help but be self-willed rather than obedient to the vernacular, since it would explain many things that would go beyond what the vernacular poems demanded. Finally Latin would both fail to fulfill the command of the vernacular (by communicating with only the learned among the vernacular population) and exceed the command of the vernacular (by communicating to readers among the Germans, the English, and others). The latter would be a particular problem because the beauty of the poetry’s language could not be conveyed along with its meaning. Poetry, Dante says, cannot be translated without a loss of beauty and harmony. In Chapter 8 Dante begins to argue that his choice of the vernacular for his treatise was motivated by complete generosity. He then proceeds to argue that complete generosity has three characteristics: First, it should be a gift to many rather than to few. Second, it should be useful (and this, Dante says, means that it should be done cheerfully, should be made more valuable by being given, should nourish friendship, and should be given without compulsion). Third, the gift should be unasked, because that makes its giving an act of generosity rather than commerce. Applying these criteria in Chapter 9, Dante argues that a Latin commentary would not have served many but only the learned few. Nor would Latin have been particularly useful. Since Dante’s purpose is to lead readers to knowledge and virtue through commentary on his canzoni, Latin would not be useful

since most of those he is trying to reach know only Italian. Finally, a commentary in the vernacular is something that no one has asked for before, whereas many have asked for, and received, commentaries in Latin on a variety of subjects. Therefore Dante has chosen to write in Italian out of pure generosity. In Chapter 10 Dante says that in addition to the appropriateness of the vernacular and his own generosity, the other reason for his use of Italian in his commentary was his love of his native language. Love moves the lover to magnify the beloved, as Dante does by using Italian to express true virtue. Love also causes the lover to be jealous of his beloved. Dante suggests that had he written the commentary in Latin, someone—probably someone far less competent—would have translated it into Italian; therefore Dante has rendered the text in Italian himself, trusting no one else to do it. Finally, the true lover seeks to defend his beloved. Dante was moved, he says, to defend the Italian vernacular against other languages that some claimed were superior, by demonstrating the ability of Italian to express complex ideas. In the long 11th chapter Dante condemns Italians who disparage their own vernacular in favor of some other language, such as Provençal. Such men do so from one of five causes. First, they may lack discernment and therefore are swayed by popular opinion, which holds Italian to be inferior to other languages. The second cause may be disingenuousness, and people in this group consist mainly of writers who, in order to excuse their own lack of skill, blame the language they write in and praise another in which they have not been required to write. The third reason is a vain desire for glory, and those in this camp mistakenly believe they will be more admired if they write in a language not their own. A fourth group is motivated by envy. Some may envy the accomplishments of a writer in the vernacular but attack the language in which he writes rather than the work itself in order to find fault with the writer. Finally, some condemn the vernacular out of baseness of mind. Just as a pretentious person thinks all he has is greater than it really is, so the base person thinks everything he owns, including his language, is less valuable than it is.

Il convivio As he moves toward the end of his first book, Dante examines the causes of his own love for his native language. Alluding to Cicero, he declares in Chapter 12 that love is caused by nearness and goodness. One’s own native tongue is not only intrinsically closest to him of all languages, but also (as Dante puts it, using the Scholastic term for something nonessential to the nature of something) accidentally closer to him, since it is the language of the people to whom he is closest. As for goodness Dante argues that goodness in anything is that which is most proper to that thing, as, he says, justice is most proper to human nature, and therefore its greatest good. In a short digression he promises to discuss this point in the 14th book of the present treatise. He then asserts that apt expression is the quality most proper to language, and that he has already shown that Italian possesses that quality and hence displays the goodness that generates love. In Chapter 13 Dante demonstrates the three causes (benefit, purpose, and familiarity) that serve to intensify his love for his own language. There are two kinds of benefits, Dante says: that which causes one to exist and that which causes one to be good. Since Italian is the language that drew his parents together, it has given Dante the benefit of existence. It is also the language that led him into knowledge, the ultimate goodness, and so benefited him in that way as well. As for purpose Dante argues that the natural purpose of language is to preserve itself, as it can do only by gaining stability. Stability can be achieved through meter and rhyme. Since the production of such verse has also been Dante’s purpose, then his purpose has been the same as the vernacular’s. Finally, his knowledge of the vernacular and continual practice of it since early childhood have made him very familiar with it. Thus, for all these reasons his love for his native language has grown. Closing Book 1 by returning to his banquet metaphor, Dante proclaims that he has now cleansed all impurities from his bread and prepares to serve the meat (his poems). Thousands, he says, will be fed with his barley breads, filling up many baskets (alluding to Christ’s feeding of the 5,000 in John 6). In another allusion, to Isaiah

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9.2, he says a new light shall rise and shine on those in the darkness. Commentary For contemporary readers a 13-chapter introduction to a treatise on philosophy, particularly an introduction that provides a lengthy justification for the writer’s self-references and for his writing the tract in Italian rather than Latin, may seem trivial and tedious or even superfluous. But, it must be remembered, in his time Dante’s use of the vernacular for such a serious intellectual prose work was unheard of and required justification. As for the self-referential aspect of the text, Dante is correct in citing the rhetorical principle discouraging such personal references, but he has good reason to be concerned about his reputation and so follows the example of Boethius in the Consolation of Philosophy and writes in order to defend himself from detractors. The precise nature of the criticism leveled at Dante is difficult to assess, since he argues mainly from general principles (in the manner of contemporary Scholastic philosophers) rather than inductively, from concrete experiences. But his reception throughout Italy during the first years of his exile seems to have inspired Dante’s concern, which he deals with in Chapters 2 through 4 of Book 1. In the first place it may have been that people who knew his reputation as a young love poet would find that reputation incongruous when they met, for the first time, a mature Dante approaching the age of 40. Consciously playing his Convivio off against his Vita nuova, Dante seeks to transcend that earlier work—not to disavow it, since it is valuable in its own right, but to put it behind him as a text appropriate for his younger self, one that must now be replaced by his more mature and serious concerns. Thus the form of the Convivio—in which a poem is followed by a lengthy commentary—recalls the form of the Vita nuova. In addition concerned with the charge (based on the Vita nuova) that he had carried on an amorous affair with a “gentle lady” after the death of Beatrice, Dante chooses canzoni specifically associated with that alleged love affair as the main texts on which his philosophical treatise will be based. His claim is that the lady he loved was not a flesh-and-blood woman but rather the allegorical personification of philosophy.

254 Il convivio Another more serious blow to Dante’s reputation was no doubt his exile from Florence and the danger that people he met would believe the charges of graft brought against him. On March 10, 1302, he had been condemned to death if he ever returned to Florence. Such a sentence must have carried with it the added indignity that everyone he met might be wondering whether Dante deserved such a condemnation. It must be his task in the Convivio, therefore, not only to speak abstractly about ethical principles, but also to demonstrate, through his poetry, that he himself is motivated only by virtue, not by lust, as his earlier poems might suggest, or greed, as his death sentence might imply. Dante’s concern with his reputation throughout Italy was quite real. That concern extended, in these early years, to his reputation in Florence as well. One of the more remarkable aspects of this first book of the Convivio is the lack of invective directed toward Dante’s native city. By the time he set to work on the Convivio, it seems Dante had abandoned his association with fellow White exiles and their unrealistic plans to retake Florence by force. It is likely that Dante, dissociated from true enemies of the Florentine state, thought that the establishment (through his Convivio) of his reputation as a serious intellectual known as an authority on moral virtue might make the Black authorities relent and rescind his banishment. As a motive for writing the Convivio, that wish to return to home and family comes through poignantly in Dante’s evocation of the “sweet bosom” of Florence in Chapter 3. Not until all hopes of such a return are abandoned does Dante attack Florence as a corrupt nest of wickedness in the CACCIAGUIDA cantos at the center of the Paradiso. The Convivio begins with a quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics I.1.980—one that Dante would use again at the beginning of De monarchia. The passage introduces the desire to know as a basic aspect of human nature. It was a theme Dante was to return to again, not only in De monarchia but in the Comedy as well. In PURGATORIO 21, ll.1–4, he equates this thirst for knowledge with the spiritual thirst displayed by the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.5–15. Later, in the highest sphere of

Paradise, Beatrice asks the souls of the blest who feast at the marriage supper of the lamb to give the pilgrim Dante a foretaste of “what falls from the table of the Blest” (Canto 24, l. 5), in consideration of his “immeasurable thirst” (l. 7). For Dante this natural desire for knowledge is a craving for heavenly understanding. Using the metaphor of the heavenly feast that he was to repeat in the Paradiso, Dante constructs his whole treatise around the metaphor of his poetry as meat, his commentary as bread, and knowledge the crumbs he has himself gathered from the foot of the heavenly table. With uncharacteristic modesty Dante presents himself as not taking part in the feast himself, but rather collecting the crumbs left by others. Dante is a layman and largely self-educated. He is thus an amateur philosopher, not one, like ALBERTUS MAGNUS or SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS, who has studied at the university and debated Aristotle in Latin. These indeed have seats at the feast. But Dante has read enough, eaten of the crumbs of philosophy, to understand and to pass along what he has learned to readers familiar only with the vernacular. Thus his motive in writing this treatise is, to a large extent, democratic: All men desire knowledge, but since some are unable to learn Latin because of their involvement in the world—political leaders or busy merchants, for instance—Dante takes what may have been seen as the private province of Scholastic philosophers and gives it to all men. Precisely what that knowledge consists of is made clear in the opening sentence of the book: The citation of Aristotle clearly announces that the impetus for Dante’s interest in philosophy is not the Christianized Neoplatonism that had been standard in the West in the early Christian centuries, but rather the more recent and controversial Aristotelianism that had been introduced into Western Europe in the previous century through Muslim commentators like AVERROËS. This was a more scientific and logical worldview but had been condemned at the University of Paris in the mid13th century. However, Aquinas had succeeded, in Dante’s own lifetime, in reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, at least in a way that the church finally accepted. To the average

Il convivio layman, though, such arguments were unknown, at least until Dante could popularize them. Dante’s means of popularizing these ideas is, of course, his use of the vernacular, and he devotes the last nine chapters of his first book to a spirited defense of his choice to write in Italian. In this he is closest to the theme of the other significant incomplete text of his early years of exile, De vulgari eloquentia. As in that treatise Dante here argues that the vernacular is a legitimate vehicle for serious intellectual discourse. But a major difference in the two texts is that here Dante accepts the commonplace medieval notion that Latin was a language superior to all vernaculars, while in De vulgari eloquentia much more radically, he argues the reverse. In the later De vulgari Dante asserts that Latin as it is used in his time is an artificial construct while the vernacular is a living language and therefore superior. In the earlier Convivio, however, Dante argues the natural superiority of Latin through a master-servant metaphor that is not one of Dante’s happier images. In Chapters 6 and 7 Dante argues awkwardly that Latin cannot “understand” the vernacular and cannot be “obedient” to it, because of this natural intellectual preeminence. More concretely and perhaps more convincingly, Dante finds the unchanging nature of Latin valuable because it lends a kind of permanence to whatever is expressed, whereas the vernacular language varies too much across time and space. Still he believes that art can bestow its own permanence on the language used to create it, as he argues in Chapter 13. Remarkably it is his own poems that he chooses to put forward as examples of that kind of art. Thus rather than providing his readers with a vernacular commentary on Aristotle, thereby paralleling the Arabic or Latin commentaries already in existence among the philosophers, or rather even than providing a commentary on the work of Virgil or OVID (PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO), the accepted Latin classics that would normally be considered worthy of such a commentary if one were to decide that poetry was serious enough matter to warrant the kind of commentary normally reserved for philosophical treatises, Dante actually provides his own vernacular verse—and love verse at that—as

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matter worthy of serious commentary. There is something very bold in the conception of this text, despite the appearance of humility that characterizes the first book. Dante, to use his own banquet metaphor, provides both the meat and the bread for this intellectual feast. That boldness is explicit in the last section of Book 1, where the banquet metaphor borrows from the biblical story of the loaves and fishes. Here Dante actually equates his task with Christ’s own miracle in John 6: His bread, he says, will satisfy the hunger for knowledge of many thousands. His allusion to Isaiah 9 further suggests a parallel with the Messiah, who gives light (in Dante’s case, representing knowledge) to the people who sit in darkness.

CANZONE 1 Synopsis The first canzone of the Convivio, which provides the material for the commentary of Book 2, is the poem Voi, che ’ntendo il terzi ciel movete (“You whose intellect the third sphere moves”). It is a poem comprising four stanzas of 13 hendecasyllabic (11-syllable) lines rhyming a b c b a c c d e e d f f, concluded by a nine-line envoy rhyming a b c b a c c d d. In the first stanza Dante addresses the angelic Intelligences whose task it is to govern the movement of the third heavenly sphere, the sphere of Venus (the planet associated with the classical goddess of love). It is the power of this sphere (i.e., the power of love) that moves him; therefore, these Intelligences are the only appropriate audience for his words. He begs them to listen to him as he tells about the sorrow in his heart and about the contrasting spirit that comes to him from Venus’s sphere. Once, he says in stanza 2, a thought from his heart would find its way to Heaven, where it would see his lady (i.e., the dead Beatrice) in glory and would return to him with news of her that made his heart desire to travel to that realm to be with her. Now, though, another thought has chased the first away, making him look upon another lady and whispering that true bliss may be found in that lady’s eyes. In stanza 3 Dante describes an allegorical battle in his heart, wherein the humble thought of Beatrice

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is slain by its enemy, the new thought. His soul cries out at the loss of the earlier thought, which so often had consoled him in his grief. The soul then laments the fact that the speaker’s eyes had been looked upon by the new lady’s eyes, and the speaker bewails this gaze, which will prove to be his death. But in stanza 4 a new spirit of love appears to him and tells the speaker that he will not die. The power of the new lady has frightened him, but she is possessed of all courtly virtues, and he should therefore make her his new lady. Such miracles will occur if he accepts the gentle lady as his love that he will be inspired to say to love, “Behold your handmaid.” In the final envoy Dante addresses the poem itself, saying that it is so complex that few will really understand it. If it happens that it is sung before an uncomprehending audience, Dante advises the canzone to ask them at least to admire how beautiful the song is. Commentary In Canto 8 of the Paradiso the soul of CHARLES MARTEL quotes the first line of this poem to the pilgrim Dante in the sphere of Venus (l. 37). Since Charles Martel had visited Florence in 1294, it is assumed he would have become familiar with the poem at that time. Thus this first canzone is a poem probably written a good 10 years prior to the Convivio, during the time described in the Vita nuova when Dante turned to the “gentle lady” at the window for consolation upon Beatrice’s death. It describes a time when, at least temporarily, he allowed himself to experience this new love. The poem is written very much in the style of GUIDO CAVALCANTI: Like Guido’s poetry, it employs learned philosophical imagery, using the notion of Intelligences that guide the heavenly spheres. As in Cavalcanti love is seen primarily as a negative thing (at least until the final stanza), causing the speaker fear and distress. Further, as in Cavalcanti, the description of love is psychological—stanza 3 of Dante’s poem occurs strictly in the speaker’s mind, as one thought battles another one, and the soul laments what the eyes have seen. The emphasis on the speaker’s psychology allows Dante to employ another common feature of Cavalcanti’s poetry, the doctrine of the “spirits.” From

contemporary medical treatises Cavalcanti had borrowed the concept of spirits manufactured in the psyche that are essentially products of the mind but can be sent forth into the world and return to the sender. The “thoughts” of this poem are such spirits, and the reference in the second stanza to the thought that one would visit Heaven and take back news of the speaker’s lady is a direct reference to the final SONNET of the Vita nuova, Oltre la spera che più larga gira (“Beyond the sphere that makes the widest round”), in which a spirit, released as a sigh from the grieving lover, travels to Paradise and takes back news in words the speaker cannot understand—he can only make out the name Beatrice. Clearly this canzone was written after that sonnet. In this poem there are three such spirits: the one who still tells the speaker of Beatrice, the enemy spirit who drives out that first one and forces the speaker’s mind to focus on the new noble lady, and a third more gentle spirit of love who appears in the fourth stanza to convince him to accept the new lady as his beloved. A final aspect of Cavalcanti’s poetic treatment of love is his notion of exclusivity: One must be truly noble and refined in spirit, something of a superior being, truly to love and truly to understand love (thus the learned language served to prevent the unlearned, and therefore inferior, beings from understanding the nature of love). Thus the conclusion of Dante’s canzone, wherein he suggests that there will be many who do not understand his poem, recalls the conclusion of Cavalcanti’s most famous canzone, “Donna me prega” (“A Lady Asks Me”), in which, after defining love in difficult Scholastic terms, he tells the lady that she should now know enough to speak of love to those with understanding—and that she should have no desire to be with others. One last point worth noting is the conclusion of stanza 4 of Dante’s poem, where the spirit of love suggests that the new lady will please the speaker so much that he will want to say to the personified god of love, “Behold your handmaid: Do as you please” (l. 52). This direct allusion to Mary’s response to the announcement of the Incarnation in Luke 1.38—“Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the

Il convivio servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word’ ”—is a bit of near-blasphemy not unlike GUIDO GUINIZELLI’s mistaking his lady for an angel in his poem Al cor gentil (“The Gentle Heart”). Thus like the doctrine of the spirits the religious imagery is characteristic of the DOLCE STIL NOVO school of poetry epitomized by Cavalcanti. Here the point seems to be that the new lady’s love is a miracle that will save the speaker and give him new life—even as Christ’s incarnation saved and gave new life to all humanity.

BOOK 2 Synopsis The second book opens with Dante’s assertion that he must now show how his first course should be eaten—that is, how the reader should approach his poem. He says that an interpretation can be both literal and allegorical and goes on to delineate the four senses according to which a text can be read. The first of these is literal, that is, the surface meaning. Beneath that, he says, is the allegorical, the truth behind the fiction. Theologians take this sense differently from poets, Dante says, but since he is discussing poetry he will speak in the manner of the poets. The third sense is the moral, the meaning one takes away from the reading for one’s own profit. The fourth sense is anagogical—what the text signifies with regard to eternal glory. Dante stresses at the end of the first chapter that as the material of anything must precede its form, or the foundation before the structure, so the literal sense must be determined before one attempts to understand any of the other senses. In Chapter 2 Dante summarizes the literal sense of the canzone, Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete. After Beatrice’s death the sphere of Venus had revolved twice before the gentle lady (mentioned at the end of his Vita nuova) appeared to him and stayed on his mind. He was moved by her pity for him and inclined to love her, though before that love could take root there was a great struggle in his mind with the older love of Beatrice. Tormented by this inner struggle, he says, he felt compelled to cry out in the first words of this poem. Dante ends the chapter with a brief discussion of the structure of the canzone, similar to those he included in the

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Vita nuova. The poem is in three parts, he says. The first stanza, in which the Intelligences or angels are asked to listen to the poem, is the first division of the canzone. The second division comprises the second through fourth stanzas, which describe the poet’s inner turmoil. The third part is the fifth stanza, which is addressed to the poem itself. Dante will deal with each part in turn. In the third chapter Dante begins to explore in more detail the literal meaning of his first stanza, beginning with a discussion of his reference to the “third heaven.” Aristotle, he says, was mistaken in his assertion that there were eight heavenly spheres, the last being the sphere of the fixed stars. Ptolemy corrected this error by positing a ninth sphere that acted as the first mover, the Primum Mobile. Aristotle also erred in assuming that the Sun occupied the second sphere from Earth, after the Moon. The true order places the sphere of the Moon first, Mercury second, Venus third, the Sun fourth, Mars fifth, Jupiter sixth, Saturn seventh, the fixed stars eighth, and the Primum Mobile ninth, with the Empyrean Heaven—home of the blessed souls— beyond the last sphere. The Primum Mobile is the swiftest turning sphere, since it makes the widest circle but must complete its motion—as must all the other spheres—in 24 hours. Each sphere has, as the Earth itself, two poles and an equator. Because the spheres move more swiftly (and therefore have more life) at the equator, Dante claims that stars nearer the equator are more filled with virtue than those near the poles. Finally, the spheres of the planets each contain a smaller sphere called an epicycle, and on the outer edge of this smaller sphere is attached the planet itself—in this case Venus. Having explained the third Heaven, Dante devotes the fourth chapter to a discussion of the movers of that sphere, the Intelligences to whom he addresses his poem. There have been many theories concerning these Intelligences, or angels, as many call them. Aristotle believed there were only as many such beings as there were spheres to move. PLATO believed in an Intelligence devoted to each species of created thing, and he called it an “idea.” The pagans believed that the Intelligences were gods and goddesses who caused various effects in the world. These beliefs, Dante claims, display a

258 Il convivio deficiency of reason. Reason alone perceives that there are far more angelic beings than there are perceived effects. Dante reasons that angelic beings must, as humans, engage in both an active and a contemplative life. Since the contemplative life is more godlike, it follows that God loves it more, and so more angels must engage in it than in the active life. Since we only perceive those Intelligences that are active, there must be many more that we do not perceive. Dante ends the chapter by affirming that we should admire these heavenly creatures: Although we cannot perceive them with our senses, Dante says, we have some hint of their existence in our minds. In Chapter 5 Dante states that a lack of instruction also led pagans to false conclusions about angels. We have instruction from God himself in the form of Christ. We know of the heavenly messenger who went to Mary. Christ spoke of legions of angels that could be sent by his Father. The church divides the angels into a hierarchy of three sets with three orders of angel in each. From lowest to highest these consist of Angels, Archangels, and Thrones; then Dominions, Virtues, and Principalities; and finally Powers, Cherubim, and Seraphim. The highest order of these contemplative beings gazes upon the power of the Father; the second order on the wisdom of the Son, and the third on the love of the Holy Spirit. Further each order contemplates its person in a different way, as the Seraphim contemplate the Father in himself as First Cause, the Cherubim contemplate him in relation to the Son, and the Powers his relation to the Holy Spirit. One-tenth of the angels were lost soon after their creation, and human beings were created to make up that number. Each of the nine spheres of Heaven is moved by one of the orders of angels, and the third sphere is assigned to the Thrones, who burn with the love of the Holy Spirit. That angelic love kindles love in the world below, and it was in recognition of that that pagans identified Venus as goddess of love. Each movement of the sphere—including the movement of the planet in its epicycle, the movement of the whole sphere in relation to the Sun, and the movement of the sphere in relation to the fixed stars—is governed by one of the Thrones. Thus there are at least

three Thrones; whether the daily movement of the sphere from east to west is caused by a Throne or by the Primum Mobile Dante does not venture to guess. These Thrones are those to whom Dante’s canzone is addressed. In Chapter 6 Dante completes his literal interpretation of the first part of the canzone. He asks the Thrones to listen to what is in his heart even though they have no sense perception, meaning that he asks them to understand with their intellect. When he speaks of his “heart,” he says, he refers to his inner thoughts. There are two reasons he says it is proper to speak to them: First, his condition is so strange that only they are likely to understand. Second, anyone who profits or receives a benefit or wrong from someone will speak of it first to the benefactor (to thank him) or to the malefactor (to move him to compassion). Since the movement of Venus has caused his current crisis, Dante addresses the Thrones. In order to persuade the Thrones to listen he promises to speak of new and momentous things and then speaks of the spirit that descends from their star. That “spirit,” he says, is the constant thought of the gentle lady, a thought from which his soul, held back by another thought—the memory of Beatrice—withholds its assent. He ends the chapter with a comment that the influence of Venus on our souls is remarkable given the fact that its distance from us is 167 times the distance to the center of Earth, which he estimates to be 3,250 miles. Now in the seventh chapter Dante begins speaking of the second part of the poem, which he subdivides into three sections corresponding to the three middle stanzas. In the first he speaks of the nature of the conflicting thoughts within him. Second, he considers the outlook of the old thought of Beatrice; third, he discusses the attitude of the new thought, that of the gentle lady. In the first stanza, Dante says, he uses the term life to refer to the actualization of the highest function of any being— for humans, this means reason. Thus the life of his heart consists of thoughts. His older thought was the one that dwelled on Beatrice’s place in Heaven, and it was so sweet as to make him desire death himself. The new thought, however, is so powerful that it takes control of his soul and turns his gaze

Il convivio toward the new lady, promising him that the sight of her eyes will be his salvation. In the eighth chapter Dante prepares to discuss the turmoil in his mind, beginning with the thought of Beatrice that is ultimately replaced in the poem. He will begin with this, he says, because it is more effective rhetorically to end with the most important item—in this case with the thought that proves victorious. First he notes that the Intelligences, whose influence incites love, are effective only with those within their power—that is, those in the world. Once Beatrice passed out of the world, she was no longer in love’s power. This remark causes Dante to digress about the afterlife. Dante expresses certain faith in the afterlife for several reasons: First, all authorities in every philosophy and rational religion agree that something in us is immortal. Second, human beings are superior to all other animals. No other animal expects an afterlife. Humans do, and if they are deceived, then they are in fact the most imperfect of animals, and that is impossible. Third, if nature put such a hope in our minds, which could lead some of us deliberately to shorten our earthly lives, then nature has worked against itself, and that is not possible. Fourth, our dreams reveal our immortality to us. And finally, we have the word of Jesus Christ that we are immortal, and that is always the truth. In Chapter 9 Dante returns to the discussion of his third stanza. The thought of Beatrice that had occupied his soul, contemplating her joy in Paradise, speaks in grief, shocked by the speaker’s sudden change. This thought focuses its lament on the speaker’s eyes. It curses the moment when the gentle lady looked into them: Only what enters the eyes in a straight line will enter directly into the imagination, and that is what has happened here. The thought also chastises the eyes for disobeying its command and looking upon the gentle lady, for the speaker’s soul knew that it was predisposed to receive the gentle lady’s charms. This presumption of the eyes has, in fact, endangered them, the thought of Beatrice contends. Dante moves on in Chapter 10 to speak of his fourth stanza, depicting the answer of the new and victorious thought. The stanza is in two parts, Dante says. The first reprimands the soul for cow-

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ardice, saying that it is not dead but only bewildered at having fallen in love with this new lady. The second part records the virtues of the new lady. The new thought is here called a “little spirit of love,” Dante says, to indicate his soul’s acceptance of it. The lady is compassionate, the little spirit says, and Dante notes that compassion is not simply an emotion like pity but a disposition of mind. The lady is also courteous, and Dante defines courtesy as dignity, virtue, and fine manners, which were formerly practiced in courts (though contemporary Italian courts practice only rudeness). The lady is also humble, wise, and magnificent. The thought finally convinces the soul to call the new love “lady.” With Chapter 11 Dante completes his literal interpretation of the canzone. He briefly analyzes the poem’s envoy, which he calls the third part of the poem. He uses the term tornada in discussing it, denoting the fact that he addresses his poem directly. He asserts, first, that in any discourse the goodness and beauty of the composition are separate, the goodness lying in the poem’s meaning and the beauty in its style. The beauty of this canzone was easy to see, Dante says, but its meaning was difficult. Second, it is sometimes effective to speak to people indirectly, as here Dante addresses his words to the poem and his meaning to his readers. Few will understand the poem well, because the speech is difficult and complex, but the reader should still consider the beauty of its composition, its order, and its rhythm. Now in Chapter 12 Dante finally turns from the literal interpretation of his poem to its allegorical and “true” meaning. While in the throes of his grief over Beatrice’s death, he says, he sought consolation in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (written to find comfort while Boethius was imprisoned), as well as in Cicero’s De amicitia (written to console Laelius upon the death of his friend Scipio). His reading not only gave him solace but also sparked in him a love of philosophy, so that after some 30 months of seeking out philosophy at schools and in disputations, Dante was so enamored of philosophy that it drove all other thoughts from his mind. The gentle lady of his poem, then, is the allegorical Lady Philosophy, whose virtue drew his thoughts from his first love.

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In the long 13th chapter Dante explains the allegory of the “third heaven” in his poem. The heavens in his poem denote the sciences, he says. As the heavenly spheres do, each science revolves around the subject that is its center, and each science illuminates its subject. Also, as the heavens are responsible for bringing about physical generation, what Dante calls the “first perfection,” the sciences are responsible for engendering our ability to contemplate the truth, which he calls the “second perfection.” The seven planetary spheres Dante equates with the seven liberal arts: Thus the Moon, Mercury, and Venus correspond to the trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric; the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn correspond to the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. The sphere of the fixed stars parallels the advanced study of physics and metaphysics, and the Primum Mobile that of moral science. As for the unmoving and unchanging Empyrean Heaven, Dante relates it to the study of theology. Dante spends most of the chapter describing two properties of each planet that parallel properties of its respective science. In the case of the third sphere, Venus, for example, Dante says that Venus’s brightness makes its appearance sweeter than that of any other star, just as rhetoric is sweeter than any other science. Further, as Venus appears both in the morning and in the evening, so the rhetorician may speak directly to a listener (an immediate, morninglike experience) or may speak through writing (a delayed, eveninglike one). In Chapter 14 Dante completes his discourse on the relationship of the heavens to the sciences. The fixed stars are like both physics and metaphysics: There are, Dante says, 1,022 stars in the heavens, and for Dante these numbers signify three kinds of movement (the two symbolizing local movement, the 20 movement by alteration, the 1,000 movement by growth), and these three movements are studied in physics. The galaxy or Milky Way is believed to be a multitude of stars that we cannot see, and in this it is like metaphysics, which studies what cannot be seen. The pole that can be seen represents material things, studied in physics, while the pole we cannot see suggests metaphysics, which studies what cannot be seen. The daily revolution

of the stars from east to west suggests the corruptible things of the temporal world (the study of physics), while the gradual countermovement from west to east (of one degree per hundred years) represents metaphysics—because it will never be completed since, Dante says, we are now in the last age of the world. The Primum Mobile directs the daily movements of all other spheres and so is like moral philosophy. Without the Primum Mobile the universe would be in chaos, so without moral science there would be no happiness. As for the Empyrean Heaven, it remains peaceful and unchanging as the divine science of theology, in which there can be no diverse opinions because God himself is one and unchanging. In his 15th and final chapter Dante more specifically explores the allegorical meaning of his canzone. The third sphere, he has made clear, denotes the science of rhetoric, and the Intelligences to whom he refers are in fact Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Marcus Tullius Cicero, and others whose discourses helped to kindle his love for Lady Philosophy, who is the true “gentle lady” glorified in the poem. When in stanza 2 he refers to the lady’s eyes, he is referring to her philosophical demonstrations that, when perceived by the eyes of the intellect, stimulate its love for her. The “sighs of anguish” alluded to in the stanza signify the difficulties of hard study required to understand philosophy’s truths. For the third stanza Dante asserts a moral interpretation, asserting that one should not forsake a good friend because he finds a better one, but that if forced to make a choice he should keep to the better friend. Finally, in the fourth stanza Dante says that the “gentle spirit of love” alluded to is a thought springing from his philosophical study. The miracles to which he refers are wonders whose causes philosophy can reveal. He ends by asserting again that the “lady” of this amorous poem was no corporeal woman but Lady Philosophy herself, whom he calls the daughter of God. Commentary Certainly one of the most interesting aspects of the Convivio’s Book 2 is Dante’s commentary on allegory in the first chapter. The four levels of interpretation he discusses are the same as those he

Il convivio mentions in his “Letter to Can Grande” concerning the interpretation of his Comedy. These are levels that had become commonplace in the interpretation of Scripture. The literal level is, of course, the straightforward historical meaning of the words— or, in the case of a work of fiction created by a poet, the straightforward description of the plot. Both the Scripture and the poet’s fiction can also be read allegorically. In the scripture this may take the form of the typological prefiguring that occurs in relating the Old Testament to the New (as Jonah in the belly of the great fish, for example, prefigures Christ descending to the dead). For secular poetry this reading can involve other kinds of correspondences, as Dante explores by suggesting that the seven planets can stand for the seven liberal arts. The moral or tropological sense involves the application of the text to the moral life of human beings—a sense Dante illustrates with the rather quirky reading of the transfiguration scene in the Gospels, in which Christ chooses only SAINT PETER, SAINT JOHN THE APOSTLE, and SAINT JAMES THE APOSTLE to accompany him. Dante reads this morally as evidence that we should have few companions when we are involved in secret matters. The anagogical sense relates the text to what can be known about eternal glory, so that the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt denotes the soul’s departure from the prison of the body. Dante asserts that the literal sense must be understood first, but he refers to the allegorical sense as the “truth” that may hide below the “beautiful lie” of the fiction. In the case of his poems Dante is particularly concerned with defending his reputation from those who faulted him for deserting the memory of Beatrice for another woman. Though his canzoni suggest that is the case, these are in fact the beautiful fictions; the truth behind them, he claims, is his love of philosophy. Most of Book 2 (Chapters 2–11) provides a literal interpretation of the canzone. In it Dante describes how the thought of the gentle lady drove the thought of Beatrice from his mind. Since this description contradicts what Dante had written on the Vita nuova, where he presents himself as temporarily taking comfort from the gentle lady but then rejecting her to return to the memory of

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Beatrice, some have suggested that the Vita nuova had originally ended with the narrator’s relationship with the gentle lady, but that Dante revised his text around 1308, to make it better conform to his plans for the Comedy. But there is no real evidence for anything of this sort, and the discrepancy remains largely unexplained. Those troubled by the inconsistency may be thinking of the Vita nuova as straight autobiography rather than a fictionalized account designed for Dante’s own specific aesthetic purposes. In the Convivio he has very different goals. The chapters concerning the heavenly spheres and the angels are of general appeal to those readers with an interest in medieval notions of the cosmos. But they are also significant as background to the Comedy. While Aristotle had proposed eight spheres, Dante accepts Ptolemy’s plan of nine, comprising the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, and the Primum Mobile, the order that he uses for the structure of his Paradiso. In his view of angels Dante is more original. Thomas Aquinas, for example, had suggested in his Summa contra Gentiles that the Intelligences that moved the spheres were all of the angelic order of Virtues. Dante, on the other hand, assigns one of the nine orders of angels to each of the nine spheres. The hierarchy of angelic orders Dante employs here (Angels, Archangels, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Principalities, Powers, Cherubim, and Seraphim) follows SAINT GREGORY THE GREAT. In the Paradiso, however, Dante follows the order set forth by the Pseudo-Dionysius (Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim), essentially correcting his previous “error” in the Convivio (Paradiso 28, ll. 130–139). As for Dante’s assertion that the contemplative life is more valued by God than the active (prompting the assumption that there must be many more angels beyond those moving the spheres), this is in line with the superiority of Rachel to Leah in Dante’s dream in Canto 18 of the Purgatorio, or SAINT BENEDICT OF NURSIA’S position above Saint Augustine in the Mystic Rose in Canto 33 of the Paradiso.

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One of the more remarkable passages in Book 2 is the digression in Chapter 8 regarding the afterlife of the individual human soul. Inspired by his earlier thoughts of Beatrice in bliss, Dante is moved to consider human immortality in general, essentially justifying for himself and his readers his faith that Beatrice is indeed alive and with God. He argues that all writers and thinkers, whether philosophers, Jews, Muslims, pagan poets, or Tarars, assert that a part of us is immortal. In fact Dante knows this to be untrue. He was clearly familiar with the Averroist notion that the active intellect was the same force in all men, and the only part of the soul that was immortal—a doctrine that effectively denied the survival of individual personality. He was also aware of the Epicurean heresy popular in the Sicilian court of FREDERICK II OF SWABIA and subsequent generations, for he puts FARINATA DEGLI UBERTI and CAVALCANTE DEI CAVALCANTI in the circle of heretics in Inferno 10 for such beliefs. Further, as John A. Scott points out, Dante’s own “first friend” Guido Cavalcanti (the chief poetic inspiration for the Vita nuova) implies this same heresy in his influential canzone Donna me prega (Understanding Dante 119). Perhaps Dante meant that, while certain individuals denied the soul’s immortality, the overall preponderance of opinion at all times has been in favor of the afterlife. The energy he puts into his defense of the doctrine here suggests both his knowledge that there are some, even among those close to him (such as Guido), who had expressed doubts about immortality and his deep personal need to know that his beloved Beatrice was eternally with God. Chapters 12 through 15 of Book 2 finally develop the allegorical interpretation of Dante’s canzone. The identification of the comforting gentle lady with Lady Philosophy is a fairly natural correspondence, particularly considering the debt he acknowledges to Boethius. From this connection the identification of the angelic Intelligences with Cicero, Boethius, and other philosophers follows logically. There is even a certain similarity between the 10 heavenly spheres, through which one must pass one sphere at a time to reach the highest Heaven, and the 11 intellectual disciplines

that one must master one at a time before reaching the study of theology, the highest of sciences. But the explanation of how the heavenly spheres correspond to different intellectual disciplines seems strained and even ludicrous to a contemporary reader. In describing how the planet Jupiter is like geometry, for example, Dante asserts that as Jupiter is a temperate planet between the heat of Mars and the cold of Saturn, so geometry moves between the point and the circle (the point being the beginning of geometry and the circle, as the perfect figure, its end). If it is difficult to see the connection, consider the second parallel Dante draws: Jupiter, he says, is the whitest of all the planets, just as geometry is the whitest or purest of all the sciences because it is without error. Such are the imaginative leaps Dante makes to force his scheme of heavenly spheres to fit the hierarchy of sciences he enumerates. Further, Dante solves the problem of fitting 11 sciences into 10 spheres by including physics and metaphysics in the same sphere—that of the fixed stars—another imaginative stretch. Dante’s most important contention in this section on the sciences, however, is his insertion of the science of ethics or moral philosophy just below theology as the discipline associated with the Primum Mobile. In this Dante deviates from the order proposed by Thomas Aquinas and by Aristotle, both of whom place metaphysics higher than ethics in the hierarchy of sciences. For Dante, however, ethics was for human beings what the Primum Mobile was for the heavenly spheres. Without the Primum Mobile the universe would be in chaos. Without ethics all other sciences are meaningless and human society would be in chaos. Here is where Book 2 ends, concluding with an announcement of the theme of Book 3: the nobility of Lady Philosophy. But first Dante provides the text of his second canzone.

CANZONE 2 Synopsis The canzone that opens Book 3 is Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona (“Love, that speaks to me within my mind”), a song in five long stanzas extolling the angelic qualities of the poet’s new gentle lady. In stanza 1 the personified god of love speaks within

Il convivio the poet, but his intellect is unable to understand. Nor is he able to speak of her in a way that would make sense of what love has told him. Thus, what he cannot understand or speak of must be left out when he does speak of her, as he does in this poem. If there is a problem with his verse, then, the blame must be placed on his own weak intellect, and on the Italian language itself, which lacks the ability to do his new love justice. In stanza 2 Dante says that the sun itself shines nowhere so noble as when it shines on his lady. The angels of Heaven appreciate her, and all earthly lovers are filled with admiration for her. God has given her a power beyond the limits of nature, so that she herself reveals what God is like, and she engenders sighs in all who see her. The third stanza continues in this vein: The lady is like an angel into whom some power of God descends. Any lady who doubts this need only walk with her and observe her movements. When the gentle lady speaks, a spirit of Heaven descends to tell us that her worth goes beyond normal humanity. What is beautiful in a woman is defined as whatever is most like her. In her we see a true miracle to strengthen our faith. In the fourth stanza Dante asserts that the lady’s face mirrors the joys of Paradise. In lines that recall the first stanza Dante says that her beauty overwhelms his intellect and makes it difficult for him to speak of it. But her beauty strikes us and shatters our vices. Let any woman whose humility is in question look at his lady, he says, for God made her as the embodiment of humility. Like the first canzone, this one ends with a tornada, in which Dante addresses his song. Referring to an earlier poem about this lady in which he complained of her haughtiness, he argues that such had been his perception at the time, but not the lady’s true character. At that time, he says, his soul was afraid. He tells the song to excuse itself for this reason when it enters the lady’s presence and to promise to sing her praises everywhere. Commentary This canzone has a particularly complex metrical form. It uses five 18-line stanzas rhyming a b b c a b b c c d e e d f d f g g. Lines are hendecasyllabic (11 syllables) except line 12 (precisely the two-thirds point of the stanza), which is only seven syllables. This

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structure has the effect of changing the direction of the stanza for the final six lines, much like the turn of thought between the octave and the sestet of a sonnet. In the second stanza, for example, the first 11 lines discuss what the sun, angels, love, and God himself think of the lady and give to her, while the final six lines focus on the effect that she has on those who see her on earth. The style of this poem is very much in the vein of Cavalcanti and the Dolce stil novo. Dante utilizes the learned imagery of astronomy and theology, including the idea of the Intelligences who reflect God’s power. In stanza 3 Dante also uses the learned notion of the gentle lady as the Platonic ideal against which all other women must be measured. The Cavalcantian notions of psychology that include the idea of sighs enkindled by the beauty of the lady’s form entering through our eyes (at the end of stanza 2) is also prevalent in the poem, while the comparison of the lady with a heavenly creature in stanza 3 owes a good deal to Guinizelli’s famous canzone “Al cor gentil” (“The Gentle Heart”). For that matter the style and angelic image also are quite reminiscent of the image of Beatrice used by Dante in Donne, ch’avete intelletto d’amore, the breakthrough canzone in Chapter 19 of the Vita nuova. It may be this kind of repeated imagery, previously reserved for Beatrice, that particularly opened the younger Dante up to charges of infidelity to Beatrice’s memory and created the reputation against which he says he is trying to defend himself by his new readings of these poems here in the Convivio. One more point of interest in this canzone is the manner in which Dante stresses twice (first in stanza 1 and then again in stanza 4) his own inability to comprehend the extent of the lady’s perfections, and the impossibility of expressing those perfections in language. Since the lady is said to embody God’s blessings in a way that transcends nature and makes those looking upon her understand a little more about God, the lady’s resemblance to God is inescapable. Like God, she is ineffable and inexpressible in a way that (as in Guinizelli’s poem) borders on blasphemy. But it will also make it more possible for Dante to claim in his commentary that the lady represents philosophy, or

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Il convivio

divine wisdom—the daughter of God himself, and thus imbued with many of his own qualities.

BOOK 3 Synopsis In Chapter 1 Dante says that his love for the gentle lady was so intense that it could not be understood or told, but he was overwhelmed by a desire to speak about his love. As he had in the Vita nuova, Dante declares that the best way to speak about his love is to praise the lady. He gives three reasons for this: First, love of self, which Dante calls the beginning of all loves, encourages us to praise our friends, who are most like us. Second, in an unequal friendship, the inferior party must benefit the other party as best he can; thus Dante by his praise benefits the lady to the extent of his power. Third, he was concerned at the time he wrote the poem that he might be accused of inconstancy for moving on to a new love after Beatrice and therefore says that he describes the lady herself to make her virtue clear. After this introduction Dante says that his second canzone may be divided into three parts: a proem in the first stanza, praise of the gentle lady in stanzas 2 through 5, and a final tornada that clears up some confusion that might be caused by the poem. In the second chapter Dante begins his discussion of the proem, which he says falls into three parts: The first expresses the ineffable nature of his subject, the second describes his own inability to express that nature in words, and the third excuses his faults in this case. But in this second chapter Dante treats only the first line of the poem—“Love, that speaks to me within my mind”—and considers in particular the terms love and mind. Love, he says, is the union of the soul and the object of desire. Now human beings most desire God and therefore are naturally drawn to those things in nature that embody the goodness of God. This, Dante says, is love, and the quality of one’s soul is apparent in the things that one loves. The speaker of these lines, then, is his love for the gentle lady, with whom his soul is united. As for the mind in which this love speaks, Dante goes into detail concerning the three powers of the soul—the vegetative power gives life, the sensitive soul provides the five senses, while the rational soul gives the power of intellect. Of

all earthly creatures only human beings have this rational soul, and in this they are like divine beings. It is within this highest part of the soul that love speaks in the poem. Dante’s discussion of the proem continues in the third chapter, where he asserts that all things in the universe are bound by some kind of love. Simple bodies love their proper place in the world. Compound bodies love the place and season in which they were created. Plants, who represent the third kind of nature, love the places that meet the needs of their composition. Animals, who possess the fourth nature, love according to their senses. But the fifth and noblest type, the human or angelic nature, loves truth and virtue. This nature is the mind, and Dante makes it clear that his love of the lady is not simply sensual, since this love addresses his mind. Clearly there are times that he cannot understand what this love is stirring in him, and times that he is unable to express what he has perceived, and these are the two kinds of ineffability he mentioned in Chapter 2. In the fourth chapter Dante focuses on the language he has used to discuss his insufficiency. He has said that because of his weak intellect, he could not speak about many of the truths concerning his love. Further he was sometimes not able to speak of even those things he has understood, because his language lacked the eloquence to do so. He lays the blame for his failure on feeble intellect and inadequate language. But, anticipating a reader’s objection that he is blaming and excusing himself at the same time, he asserts that both human intellect and human speech are beyond his power to control: that human intellect cannot concretely imagine existence outside the physical. Nor can human speech always articulate insights that the mind may have. We ourselves are not to blame for these insufficiencies. Having finished his discussion of the proem, Dante moves to the second section of the canzone in Chapter 5. This second section he divides into three parts, corresponding to the middle three stanzas of the poem. In the first, he says, he praises his lady in her entirety; in the second he praises her soul; in the third he praises her body. Beginning with the first line of stanza 2, “The Sun that circles

Il convivio all the world,” Dante goes into a long digression about the movements of the heavens. He mentions PYTHAGORAS’s idea that the Earth itself revolved as one of the heavenly spheres, and Plato’s idea that the Earth revolves on an axis, but ironically rejects these ideas in favor of the “truth” demonstrated by Aristotle, that the Earth is stationary and the center of the heavenly spheres. Those spheres move on two poles, which can be fixed to the Earth’s north and south poles, and Dante estimates the distance between the poles as 10,200 miles (Rome, he says, is 2,600 miles from the north pole). Equidistant between the poles is the equator, and Dante goes on to describe the plane of the ecliptic—the path of the Sun that reaches its northern limit at the tropic of Cancer (which Dante correctly locates at 23 1/2 degrees north), and its southern limit at the tropic of Capricorn, at the same point south. The north and south poles, Dante reasons, must have days and nights that are six months long, while at the equator days and nights are always equal. Dante ends the chapter by praising the wisdom of God, who created the universe this way. In Chapter 6 Dante discusses his second stanza more directly. The Sun sees nothing as noble as his lady. The phrase “in that hour” Dante focuses on briefly, noting the difference between “temporal” hours (the canonical hours of prime, terce, sext, etc.)—of which there are 12 during the day and 12 at night at all seasons—and the “equal” hours, which are always the same length. Only at the equinoxes are the two types of hours equivalent. When he says that the Intelligences admire her, he explains that the angelic Intelligences know things directly from the divine mind, and so they see what God intends as the perfect exemplar of the human form. In the gentle lady they see that perfect exemplar in the flesh. Human lovers, whose chief desire is their own perfection, admire her because she is precisely what they desire—human perfection. God himself admires her as a craftsman admires his finest work. Finally, as the effect of something retains some aspect of its cause, so her physical form reflects the nature of her soul (which is what actualizes the body). That physical form is so beautiful that it is clear her soul must be miraculously blessed by God beyond common human nature.

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In his seventh chapter Dante looks at stanza 3 of his canzone, in which he praises the gentle lady’s soul. He focuses first on his statement that “celestial power” descends into her. God’s goodness, he says, descends into all things, and it is received in different ways by the various bodies in the universe. The purely spiritual angels receive this goodness in one way, the partly spiritual and partly material humans in another way, and the purely material beasts, plants, and minerals in still a different way. But even among humans the various souls receive God’s goodness differently according to their natures, as some human beings reflect God’s goodness no more than some animals do, and others border on the angelic. The lady is one of these. Dante goes on to assert that only human beings possess reason in themselves, and it is through the actions of her rational soul—through her speech and gestures—that the lady demonstrates her divine qualities. She serves as an example of behavior for other women, and as an aid to faith for all people, since as a walking miracle herself she promotes our faith in other miracles. In Chapter 8 Dante deals with his canzone’s fourth stanza, devoted to the gentle lady’s physical perfections. He follows the belief that her physical beauty reflects her soul’s goodness. Seeing her is like Paradise because it causes joy, one of the delights of Paradise. The soul, he says, manifests itself most strongly in two parts of the face: the eyes and the mouth. The eyes reflect the six emotions that Aristotle finds fitting for humans—grace, love, pity, zeal, envy, and shame. The mouth reveals the soul’s delight, Dante says, but he advises moderation in laughter. The beauty appearing in her face overwhelms our senses as bright sunlight overwhelms our weak eyes and intoxicates our souls. Ultimately since, like God, her beauty cannot be adequately described, he can only describe the effects her beauty has in the world. These effects include eliminating the vices of those who admire her. Dante describes two kinds of vices—vices of habit and vices of nature. Habitual vices can be eliminated by cultivating virtuous habits, but the same cannot be said for inborn vices of nature. The lady’s beauty, however, can miraculously eliminate innate vices and restore the nature of her admirers.

266 Il convivio Nature, Dante says, created the lady deliberately for such an effect. In Chapter 9 Dante moves to the third division of his poem, the tornada in the final stanza. He explains the figure of speech used here as prosopopoeia, an address to an inanimate object. He says that he was attempting to excuse the poem from the criticism that it contradicts one of its “sisters”—a term Dante explains as a metaphor for another of his own poems. In the earlier poem he had called the lady proud and disdainful. But he excuses this on the grounds that sometimes appearance and reality are at odds. Dante spends the rest of the chapter explaining medieval notions of sight and how vision may be confused. He rejects Plato’s belief in a visual power moving from the eye to the visible object, in favor of Aristotle’s theory of the form of the visible object moving through the “diaphanous medium” to lodge in the pupil of the eye, from which a “visual spirit” moves the image from the eye to the front part of the brain. Our sight may be faulty because of the diaphanous medium, which may, for example, be so filled with light that it blocks out our vision of the stars. Or our own eyes may be faulty. Dante reveals that in the same year he wrote his canzone he strained his own eyes so severely through heavy reading that it affected his vision until, through rest and bathing them in clear water, he restored them to their original strength. Dante continues, in Chapter 10, to discuss the final stanza. The earlier poem (a ballata), he says, judged the lady on appearances because his soul was, at the time, full of excessive desire. Citing Aristotle’s On Generation, Dante says that desire becomes stronger as the desired object gets closer, and the stronger the soul’s passion the more it abandons reason, at which point the soul judges like a lower animal and cannot see the difference between, for example, disdain and nobility. He goes on to explain the rhetorical figure he calls dissimulation, as he addresses the canzone to excuse itself for its author’s apparent self-contradiction, but addresses the meaning to someone else—to any readers who might have doubts about the consistency of the author of the poem. In Chapter 11 Dante turns from the literal reading of his poem to the allegorical and again asserts

that the gentle lady of his canzone is the representation of Lady Philosophy. Before looking at the poem in detail, however, he provides a definition of the term philosophy. The term dates, he says, from the time of Pythagoras, whom he places in about 750 B.C.E. Prior to that time seekers of wisdom were called “wise men,” but when asked whether he was a wise man, Pythagoras answered that he was a “lover of wisdom,” or, in Greek, a philosopher. The term is thus a title of humility, Dante points out. In one sense, he says, everyone can be called a philosopher since (referring to the very beginning of the Convivio) all human beings seek knowledge. But he is using the word in its more technical sense here. As friendship, true philosophy is not based on pleasure or utility. Thus someone who studies some part of philosophy (such as music or rhetoric) for his own pleasure is not a true philosopher, nor are those such as lawyers, physicians, or members of religious orders who study some branch of philosophy in order to obtain some office or financial gain. The true philosopher is one who loves all the sciences for the sake of love of the truth, which leads to true happiness. Natural science, ethics, and metaphysics are each sometimes called philosophy, but each is only one branch of what philosophy truly is. Dante begins the allegorical reading of stanza 1 in the next chapter. When he says that Love speaks to him in his mind, he says, the love represents the study he gives to acquiring philosophy. He compares this to the affection that precedes friendship or love between two people, and he reiterates his definition of philosophy as love between the soul and wisdom. As for the Sun that circles the world in stanza 2, Dante asserts that the Sun—which illuminates and gives life to all—allegorically represents God, who illuminates all intelligent beings with intellectual light and gives life to all goodness. In a short digression Dante points out that evil comes into being through malice, but that God, foreseeing the evil, does not therefore turn from creation, since then none of the good of creation would exist. Returning to his second stanza, Dante reads the allegory as God’s seeing nothing so noble as philosophy. Philosophy is the loving use of wisdom, which is part of the divine essence of God;

Il convivio therefore God and philosophy are united in a kind of eternal marriage. Dante continues his analysis of the second stanza in Chapter 13, where he focuses on the nature of philosophy, which exists primarily, he says, in the divine substance and secondarily in intelligent beings. The angels, who “admire her from above,” are constantly in touch with her, but Dante excludes the possibility that fallen angels may engage in philosophy, because (as he has already affirmed) for philosophy to exist love must be present. Philosophy is also present among human beings, and Dante notes three points implied in his discussion of human intelligence in stanza 2: First, there is a distinction among humans, and those who live according to their senses rather than reason cannot engage in philosophy. Second, unlike the angels, humans have physical needs that preclude them from being constantly in a state of speculation, as the angels may be. Third, it is only in this state that human beings may be said to be with the Lady Philosophy. Ultimately, Dante says, philosophy, the love of wisdom, creates in the human soul a contentment with all worldly conditions, and a contempt for the worldly goods to which most people devote themselves. In his 15th chapter Dante deals with his canzone’s fourth stanza, which he says praises wisdom. In the poem he praises the beauty of the lady’s eyes and mouth. Allegorically the eyes represent the demonstrations of wisdom, through which one may see the truth, and the mouth represents wisdom’s persuasions, which make one aware of the light of truth. Through them one feels the joy of Paradise. Dante further explains that all things seek their own perfection, and human perfection is the perfection of reason, which our gaze into the eyes of wisdom allows us to achieve. Our intellect may be dazzled, as it is in the poem, because some things (including God and eternity) are beyond human capability to know and must be described only by negative reasoning. One might ask how human beings can be happy when they have a natural desire to know yet cannot know certain things. Dante explains that human desire is proportionate to our capacity here. In the same way, he says, the wisdom of angels and saints is proportionate to each individual’s capac-

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ity. Thus since each attains his or her full desire, there is no envy among them. Continuing with his commentary, and focusing on the line “Her beauty rains down little flames of fire,” Dante says that the beauty of philosophy is morality. When this line is followed in the poem by one admonishing “every woman” to look upon the lady (philosophy) as an example, Dante interprets “every woman” allegorically to mean “every soul,” who should contemplate philosophy to become virtuous. Finally, in stanza 4 Dante says he praises wisdom as the origin of all things, since she was present with God at the creation of the universe. In an apostrophe to those who ignore philosophy, Dante urges them to seek her friendship. He then quickly deals with the final stanza of the poem, commenting on his earlier assessment of philosophy as disdainful and proud. This assessment was based on his own faults, he says, in his lack of understanding her arguments. Commentary Anyone familiar with the Comedy recognizes immediately that the canzone upon which the Book 3 commentary is based—Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona (“Love, that speaks to me within my mind”)—is the same poem sung by Casella in the second canto of the Purgatorio (ll. 112–117). There the poem is presented as nothing more than a literal poem concerning earthly love, and Cato of Utica sternly rebukes the pilgrim and others for wasting their time listening to Casella’s song rather than beginning their ascent of Mount Purgatory. Since Dante ultimately abandoned his Convivio, presumably to work exclusively on the Comedy, one might interpret this use of the poem in the Purgatorio as Dante’s abandonment of the fiction that the canzone ever had anything to do with love of philosophy, which Dante here calls the love of the truth (in Chapter 11), a part of the essence of God (Chapter 12), a study that inspires a contempt for worldly goods (Chapter 13), and one through which one may glimpse the joys of Paradise and achieve virtue (Chapter 15). If the poem were indeed about these things, then Cato would have no reason to object to it. Or it may simply be that in the Comedy Dante presents the poem as a love poem because that is how it was popularly understood by his readers, virtually none of whom was familiar with the Convivio,

268 Il convivio a book little read in Dante’s own lifetime (though important enough in the generations immediately following his death to have influenced Chaucer, who alludes to Book 4 of the Convivio in his discourse on gentilesse or true nobility in his “Wife of Bath’s Tale”). But readers with a memory of the canzoni in the Vita nuova will also recognize in the Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona a poem made up of the same kind of images and the same praise of the angelic lady that Dante utilizes in his Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore (“Ladies who have intelligence of love”), the breakthrough canzone in Vita nuova 19, in which Dante discovers his sweet new style. Indeed without Dante to tell us otherwise, it would be easy to assume that Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona is another poem praising Beatrice herself. It includes the same estimation of the lady as a heavenly being, admired by the angels; the same advice to ladies to use her as an example of what to strive for; the same declaration that her beauty is beyond what nature typically creates; even the same protestation that he is incapable of praising her as she deserves. No wonder Dante feared that he would be accused of having forsaken Beatrice for a new love. If the new gentle lady is allegorized as Lady Philosophy, however, these similarities pose no difficulty. In fact they reinforce his claims in the Vita nuova that his love of Beatrice is an intellectual love, on a higher plane than mundane physical attraction, and of the same quality as this later intellectual love of philosophy. More important it also foreshadows the portrayal of Beatrice in the Comedy, especially in her first meeting with the pilgrim at the summit of Mount Purgatory. If, as many readers agree, one of Beatrice’s chief allegorical meanings in the Comedy is Divine Wisdom, then a love song to philosophy is perfectly appropriate if applied to her. What connects this poem particularly with Beatrice in both the Vita nuova and the Comedy is Dante’s focus on the eyes and the mouth of the lady. Here Dante says in Chapter 15 that the lady’s eyes signify wisdom’s “demonstrations” while her mouth denotes wisdom’s “persuasions.” In the pilgrim Dante’s encounter with Beatrice in the earthly Paradise he first stares

into her eyes—which at the time are reflecting the Griffin, representing the dual nature of Christ (Purgatorio 31, ll. 106–123). At the end of that same canto her attendant maids ask her to reveal to the pilgrim her veiled mouth, which Dante finds indescribable, and in the beginning of the next canto he is blinded by her smile, a smile that for him suggests the promise of salvation. Understanding the mystery of Christ’s dual nature and how the Incarnation ultimately holds the promise of salvation is for Dante the epitome of knowledge gained through the love of Divine Wisdom. Even more basic in its influence on the Comedy is Dante’s employment here of the Neoplatonic concept of the great chain of being, borrowed, as John Scott points out (Understanding Dante 125– 126), from Albertus Magnus. In Chapter 3 Dante asserts that all things in the universe are moved by some kind of love and discusses the various forms of love within the scale of existence, beginning with inanimate matter (divided into “simple” and “compound” bodies) and moving through plants (which love the places that nourish them) and animals (whose love is sensual) to reach what he calls the “fifth nature,” that of human beings and angels, whose love is the intellectual love of truth and virtue. In a similar vein Dante maintains in Chapter 7 that God’s goodness descends into all created beings, but that because of their inherent differences, these beings receive and respond to God’s goodness in different ways. This variation occurs even with human beings themselves, among whom each individual responds to this goodness in his or her own way—some, Dante says, responding in ways more similar to those of the purely sensual beasts. This concept of natural variation along a scale determined by inherent qualities is taken up again in Chapter 15, where Dante raises the question of how, given human beings’ natural desire to know the truth, they can possibly be happy when there are things they cannot know, such as the nature of God and of eternity. Dante’s answer—that the natural desire of human beings, and of angels as well, is proportionate to their own natural capacities for knowledge, and therefore they can be happy in having reached their natural capacity for knowledge in

Il convivio the mundane world—depends once again on this governing idea of a natural scale of perfection. These concepts are basic to the Comedy. First, the idea that all created objects are governed by love lies behind Virgil’s important discourse in Canto 17 of the Purgatorio in which he attributes all human actions to love and defines sin as either perverted, misdirected, or insufficient love. This analysis explains not only the structure of Purgatory but that of the Inferno as well. As for the Paradiso, the thorny problem of a hierarchy in Heaven, reflected by the souls and the angels represented in the various heavenly spheres as well as in the seating arrangement of the mystic rose in the Empyrean Heaven itself, is solved by the principle Dante expresses here in the Convivio. If men and angels both have an intellectual desire in proportion to their natural capacities, then their happiness in Heaven is determined by their own capacities, which will vary. Thus there is a scale of perfection in Heaven, but since each individual is perfected to his own capacity, there is no jealousy or discontent with Heaven’s hierarchy. One final point of interest to readers of the Comedy is Dante’s remark in Chapter 9 that he spent so much of his time focused on reading philosophy that around the time he wrote this canzone he severely strained his eyes and damaged his vision. Many readers believe that it was at that time that Dante became especially devoted to SAINT LUCY, the patron saint of eyesight (her name, Lucia, means “light”). He may have credited her with saving his eyes. In any case Dante introduces Saint Lucy in the Comedy as the saint to whom he was particularly devoted and makes her the symbol of illuminating grace in the poem. She appears with Beatrice and the Virgin Mary as one of the three heavenly ladies concerned with Dante’s salvation in Canto 2 of the Inferno. In Purgatorio 9 she goes to Dante while he sleeps and carries him up Mount Purgatory to the gate. He last sees her seated in the Mystic Rose in Canto 32 of the Paradiso, thus portraying her in all three canticles of his Comedy. It seems quite possible that his devotion to her began with his troubled vision caused by his intense study of philosophy.

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CANZONE 3 Synopsis Book 4 is introduced by the canzone Le dolci rime d’amor, ch’i’ solìa (“The tender rhymes of love”), a complex poem comprising seven stanzas and an envoy and dealing with the nature of true nobility. In the first stanza Dante says that he is backing away from his customary theme of love because his proud lady has spurned him. For the time being, at least, he says he will turn to the subject of true nobility, in order to refute those who believe that nobility lies in wealth. In order to proceed in his argument, he calls on the lord that dwells in the lady’s eyes—by which he means truth. In stanza 2 Dante traces what he takes to be the history of the idea of nobility. A past emperor (Dante identifies him as FREDERICK II in his commentary) decided that ancient riches and courteous behavior defined nobility, and eventually the second part of that definition was dropped, so that now the general view is that ancestral wealth is the only criterion for nobility. Thus even the basest person can claim nobility if he is some famous man’s grandson. In the third stanza Dante refutes the opinion of the Emperor mentioned in stanza 2. Just as it is erroneous to claim that man is a “living tree,” as this emperor held, so his claim concerning nobility is also false. Riches cannot confer nobility, because they are themselves base and have as little effect on one’s character as a river has on a tower that stands far away from its flow. Riches cannot give peace of mind; therefore, a person of sound mind is not destroyed by losing them. Dante deals in the next stanza with the question of whether one born into the lower class can achieve true nobility. Most deny this possibility, but Dante claims that their argument—based on the assumption that time is a prerequisite for nobility—is faulty. Since in the full course of time all human beings descend from the same first parents, then all must be considered noble, or all base. Or, if one is a Christian, all human worth depends on Christ. Thus Dante rejects all arguments defining nobility in terms of wealth or birth. Citing Aristotle’s Ethics, Dante proclaims in stanza 5 that all good actions arise from virtue. Further nobility by definition implies goodness. Since

270 Il convivio both virtue and nobility have the same effect then either one encompasses the other or both have the same source. In stanza 6, Dante argues that nobility must stem from virtue, and not the opposite. All virtuous acts result from virtue itself, and no one is virtuous by birth. Virtue, Dante says, is the seed of happiness instilled in persons by God himself. In stanza 7 Dante contends that a soul endowed with this virtue demonstrates it in her actions. When young she is obedient, pleasant, and modest. In her maturity she is strong, temperate, and full of love. When old she is prudent and generous, and in death she is reunited with God. In his ending tornada the poet addresses his song, sending it out to combat the ill informed. Dante instructs the song to tell his lady, when it approaches her, that it is speaking of a friend of hers. Commentary This third canzone is metrically the most complex in the Convivio. It consists of seven 20-line stanzas rhyming a b b c b a a c c d e e d d d f f e g g. In each stanza lines 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 14, and 17 contain seven syllables each, while all others are 11-syllable lines. In the final envoy, or tornada, there are six lines, rhyming a a b c c b—like the sestet of a sonnet, but with lines of varying lengths, the second and fifth having seven syllables and the others having 11. The theme of the poem is clearly different from that of the previous canzoni, and when Dante says he is leaving the “tender” rhymes of love, he uses the word dolci, the word he himself used (in Purgatorio 26, l. 57) to describe the “sweet new style” (Dolce stil novo) that he used in his Cavalcantian love poetry. Yet in its style Le dolci rime d’amor, ch’i’ solìa is not unlike Cavalcanti’s own best known canzone, “Donna me prega” (“A Lady Asks Me”), since here Dante give a learned definition of the term gentilezza (or “nobility”), and in that poem Cavalcanti had given a learned definition of love. Structurally the poem follows the Scholastic method called the quaestio disputata (the disputed question), an approach modeled on Aristotle and used in the universities, as well as in Scholastic treatises like Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles. In the early part of the poem Dante lays out the views of previous thinkers that provide false

answers to the question “What is true nobility?” He gives three such arguments at the beginnings of stanzas 2, 3, and 4 and in each stanza follows the argument with a determinatio or refutation of the false answer. In stanzas 5 through 7 Dante provides his ratio, his own argument that acts as a direct rebuttal of the claims of the earlier authorities. In the tornada Dante tells his song to report to his lady to whom it is addressed that he is speaking of a friend of hers. Since the poem is originally intended for the woman he calls the “gentle lady,” he can make this claim concerning a poem about “gentleness” or true nobility. But it seems Dante may also have in mind the addressee as the allegorical Lady Philosophy, since he refers in the first stanza to a lord dwelling in the lady’s eyes. Considering what he has said in the previous chapter about the allegorical meaning of the lady’s eyes— that they represent the “demonstrations” of wisdom—it would seem that he is here referring to the truth that wisdom’s demonstrations reveal. The poem itself becomes a demonstration of the philosophical truth about nobility.

BOOK 4 Synopsis Dante begins his fourth and final book with the assertion that love, which makes the lover more like the beloved, inspired him to love and hate the things that his lady (i.e., philosophy) loved and hated. Thus he loved those who followed truth and hated those who did not. Realizing that hatred of persons was unreasonable, he concentrated his hatred instead on the malice and errors that made some turn from truth. The error he hated most was that regarding the goodness bestowed in human beings by nature, generally called “nobility.” Because of the confusion concerning this term, good people were often held in contempt and the evil were exalted. Thus he began the canzone preceding this book. So important was its theme that he employed no figurative language but attacked the fault directly. Thus in this book he will not speak of allegory but only explain the literal meaning of the poem. In Chapter 2 Dante divides his canzone into two parts: the first stanza or preface and the body of

Il convivio the poem. The first stanza he further subdivides into three parts. In the first (ll. 1–8) he says that he intends temporarily to stop writing of love because his lady’s looks appear to be disdainful (though he insists that appearance differs from reality). In the second part (ll. 9–17) he senses that the time is not right to sing of love and declares his intent to speak of the quality that makes one truly noble. He will, he says, speak with harsh and subtle words: Harsh refers to the sounds of the words, which should not be sweet because of the heavy subject. Subtle. refers to the meaning of the words, which provide astute and adroit reasoning to argue their point. He promises in the poem to show what is true and to refute what is false, though he says in the book itself he will do these things in the opposite order. Finally, in the third section (ll. 18–20) he calls on truth, which lives in the eyes (previously identified as the “demonstrations”) of philosophy. This truth makes the lady love herself, he says, because the philosophic soul contemplates truth but also contemplates itself in the act of contemplation and sees the beauty in that act. In Chapter 3 Dante says that the body of his poem also divides into three parts: Stanzas 2–4 discuss the opinions of others, stanzas 5–7 focus on the truth about nobility, and stanza 8 addresses the canzone itself. The first of these subdivisions is in two parts, with stanza 2 stating the opinions of others and stanzas 3–4 refuting them. Finally Dante focuses on stanza 2 itself, dividing it into two parts, the first showing where the opinion of the emperor is wrong, and the second showing why the opinion of the common people is wrong. The emperor, he says, is Frederick II of Swabia (whom Dante considered the last true Roman Emperor, at least before HENRY VII OF LUXEMBOURG in 1310), whose opinion was that true nobility required ancient wealth and courteous manners. Some lesser person, no doubt one without fine manners, omitted the second part of the emperor’s definition. There are two reasons for Dante to take these opinions seriously, he says: One is that, according to Aristotle, what most people regard as true cannot be completely wrong. The second is that Imperial authority should be respected. Accordingly he decides to begin his discussion by examining Imperial authority.

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In Chapter 4 alluding to Aristotle’s maxim that “man is a social animal,” Dante argues that human beings need society to achieve happiness, because they need things that no individual may supply. Thus humans join to form cities and nations, but to prevent nations from warring with one another, a supreme authority is needed—that of a single monarch or Imperial authority, who like the captain of a ship has complete command of the nations. Acknowledging that some may question why this authority must be a Roman prince, Dante argues that experience shows the Latin race to be the strongest, cleverest, and most temperate. The Roman Empire was won not simply through force, but because God had ordained it. Thus, citing Virgil, Dante argues that the empire began in reason, not force. Dante devotes Chapter 5 to proving that the Roman Empire was ordained by God, initially for the purpose of ensuring that the world was properly prepared for the coming of Christ. Proof of this divine destiny can be seen in the fact that KING DAVID, from whose line Christ was to spring, was born at the same time that Aeneas traveled to Italy and founded the Roman nation. From the testimony of the evangelist Luke Dante asserts that at the time of Augustus there was universal peace in the world—a situation that had never occurred before and would never occur again—and thus only at that time was the world prepared for Christ’s coming. The history of Rome also provides evidence of the empire’s divine origin. Dante lists numerous Roman citizens of “godlike” virtue, including Fabricius, who refused an inestimable amount of gold rather than betray his country, or Cincinnatus, who was called from the plow to be dictator and save his country, after which he voluntarily returned to his plow. Curius, Mucius, Brutus, and Cato are others extolled by Dante for their virtue. Further, the hand of God was manifest in several miraculous military victories that established Roman hegemony, such as the war against Hannibal and the Carthaginians, or Cicero’s defense of Rome against the machinations of Catiline. Clearly for Dante Roman dominance was planned and engineered by God’s own hand.

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Having discussed the origin of Imperial authority, Dante goes on to speak of philosophical authority in Chapter 6. Claiming that in this sense authority means simply the “pronouncement of an author,” Dante goes into the purported etymology of the word, asserting that it may be derived from the verb auieo, meaning “to tie words together,” or from the Greek autentin, meaning “worthy of faith and obedience.” Combining both senses, he declares that philosophical authority means “pronouncement worthy of faith and obedience” and proclaims that Aristotle is the philosopher most worthy of this authority. He supports Aristotle as the philosopher who saw most clearly the ultimate end for which human beings exist. In a quick survey of the history of philosophy Dante begins with Zeno, who said that our chief end was rational integrity, irrespective of any emotional persuasion. His followers were Stoics, of whom the illustrious Cato was one. Epicurus proposed that the end of human life was pleasure, by which he meant a life free from pain, and Dante lists the illustrious Torquatus as a follower of Epicurus. Socrates and Plato saw the end of life as virtue, and their followers, like Speusippus, were called Academics. Aristotle perfected the ideas of the Academics, and because he liked to discourse while walking back and forth, his followers were called Peripatetics. The ideal government, Dante concludes, unites Imperial authority with philosophical authority. Directly addressing Charles II, king of Naples, and Frederick II of Aragon, king of Sicily, Dante laments the present governors of Italy, whose advisers cannot be trusted to give wise moral advice. In Chapter 7 Dante returns to the subject of his poem’s second stanza, debunking the opinion of those who believe that one should be called noble if his ancestors were, even if he himself is worthless. Such a person, Dante insists, is not only base, but more base than anyone else. This evaluation is explained by the fact that the person who had a noble ancestor had a pattern of noble behavior set before him that he himself neglected to follow. Such a person, Dante says in his poem, is “like one who’s dead.” Dante explains this by reference to Aristotle’s De anima, where the philosopher defines life as “the state of being of living things.” Dante,

returning to the scale of being he had utilized in the previous book, maintains that this state of being varies: In animals life is sensation and movement, but in human beings it consists of rational thought. To forsake reason is therefore to forsake human life. Since straying from virtue, particularly when one has been shown explicitly where virtue lies, is tantamount to straying from reason, the base man is not truly alive in a human sense; he survives as one for whom life is simply sensation—he survives as a beast. Dante begins Chapter 8 by distinguishing between reverence—an important aspect of integrity—and its opposite, arrogance. He goes on to prove that though (as he admitted in Chapter 3) he appears to disagree with both Imperial authority and the authority of Aristotle, in fact he is not being arrogant. Dealing first with Aristotle, Dante explains that the philosopher’s statement that what is believed by the majority cannot be completely false referred to mental conceptions, not sense impressions. The Sun, he says, appears to most people to be perhaps a foot in diameter, whereas in fact its diameter is 35,750 miles. Similarly the perception that nobility consists of buildings, possessions, and lordships (things in the power of FORTUNE) is based on sense impressions and therefore need not be trusted. In demonstrating his lack of arrogance toward the empire, Dante first defines reverence as the “confirmation of due submission by manifest sign.” Failure to make this confirmation may be either “irreverent,” in which case one offends against the truth by renouncing this confirmation, or “not reverent,” in which case one refuses to acknowledge a submission that does not exist and therefore does not offend against the truth. Dante assigns his difference with Frederick II of Swabia’s comments to this latter category, since he owes him no submission in the present case. In Chapter 9 Dante explains this last statement. Like everything else, Imperial authority extends only to the limits God has fixed for it, and thus extends only as far as human activities extend. There are different kinds of human activities subject to human reason and will, including things the mind contemplates but cannot perform (like math-

Il convivio ematics), acts the mind both contemplates and performs (like speech), acts the mind performs utilizing other means (mechanical arts), and activities that are acts of will (like choices between a right and wrong action). These latter, voluntary actions are matters related to justice, which is regulated by laws that the emperor enacts and administers, and this is the extent of Imperial authority. Definitions of, for example, nobility do not involve such acts of will and hence are not subject to Imperial authority. Thus Dante says he owes the emperor no submission here. Having demonstrated the legitimacy of his stance, Dante goes on in Chapter 10 to discuss his refutation of the earlier arguments about nobility. There is no need to dispute the emperor’s assertion concerning “fine manners,” but his choice of ancestral wealth—naming both time and riches— as a criterion for nobility must be refuted. Frederick (who had apparently defined man as “a living tree”) erred in not using the term rational to define man. In the same way he erred in supposing ancestral wealth to define nobility. Nobility, Dante says, should first of all be defined according to its effects rather than its causes. Further riches themselves are base or degenerate (as are all things in Fortune’s power) and hence are themselves the opposite of nobility; thus they cannot confer their opposite. Nor can riches take nobility away, because they are totally distinct from it, and, citing Aristotle’s Physics, Dante maintains that anything that is changed must be connected with whatever caused that change. Riches have no connection with nobility. In Chapter 11 Dante sets out to prove that riches are base. The more perfect a thing is, he says, the more noble it is; the more imperfect, the more base it is. Riches are imperfect, hence base. This is not to say that considered in themselves gold or pearls do not have a kind of perfection, but considered as human possessions, they are imperfect. The reason for this is the injustice in their distribution. One can obtain riches by pure chance (for example, finding a hidden treasure), by chance aided by reason (for example, through inheritance), or through chance aiding reason—either lawfully (through a respectable occupation) or unlawfully (through theft). Citing an example from Aristotle of a base peasant

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finding a bushel of silver at Falterona, Dante argues that chance is more likely to favor the bad than the good. Deliberately naming no names, he asserts that inheritance comes more often to the bad than the good. Theft of course always benefits the bad. And as for lawful gain through a good occupation, Dante claims that a good man is less likely to accrue wealth this way, since his mind and efforts will be directed toward more important things than the accumulation of riches. Thus all ways of gaining wealth are likely to be unjust. A good man will be involved in a different kind of commerce: the performance of benevolent acts, through which one accumulates friendships. In Chapter 12 Dante continues his demonstration of the baseness of riches: Not only does their acquisition result from injustice, but they are actually dangerous, since accumulating them only makes one desire more. This makes them particularly dangerous, since they promise complete satisfaction but in fact bring about its opposite. The more riches one acquires, the more one desires to have; thus riches never produce satisfaction but only greater desire and hence confer grief rather than peace. Dante cites Boethius, Solomon, David, SENECA (LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA THE YOUNGER), HORACE (QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS), Juvenal, and both categories of law (canon and civil) as evidence that riches are imperfect no matter how much one accumulates. Dante admits that it might be possible to make the same argument about knowledge: As with riches, the more knowledge one obtains the more desire one has for more. Dante shows that this is indeed true but denies that it necessarily follows that knowledge is dangerous and base, or the cause of grief. In Chapter 13 Dante first deals with the difference between the desire for knowledge and the desire for riches. Desire for knowledge grows, it is true, but its growth is a progression from small things to greater ones—not, as with riches, a single unsatisfied desire. The desire for knowledge is satisfied with the attainment of each new portion of knowledge, but the desire for riches is never satisfied. This is explained in part by the fact that desire for knowledge is a natural desire, and (as Dante had argued in Chapter 3) natural desires are limited by

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the natural world, and so may all be satisfied within certain natural limits. There are no natural limits on the desire for riches. Dante now moves back to the proof that desire for riches is harmful. This desire is harmful for two reasons, he says: It is the cause of evil and it is the absence of good. It causes evil in that those who possess riches are fearful of losing them. Dante cites the story by LUCAN (MARCUS AMNAEUS LUCANUS) of Amyclas, whose poverty allowed him to be perfectly secure in the presence of GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR (a story Dante utilizes again in Canto 11 of the Paradiso). Riches also contribute to the privation of good, since their possession precludes the virtue of generosity—which can only exist in giving up riches. Thus no upright or true man will covet riches. In Chapter 14 Dante begins to deal with the opening lines of the fourth stanza of his canzone, and the question of whether ancestral wealth is the cause of riches. Those who hold to this opinion believe that one born base can never be called noble, and that one whose parents were born base can never be called noble. Dante points out the absurdity of this opinion, since such a contention implies an infinite regression, so that there is no point of time in history when anyone could have become noble. Anticipating that one might counter this by suggesting that one becomes noble when people no longer remember the baseness of his ancestors, Dante finds four fallacies in this argument. First, it would imply that the more absentminded people were, the more noble they would be. Second, it would mean that the nobility of other things, such as animals or plants, would be determined by their goodness but that of men only by their loss of memory. Third, it would mean that the cause would sometimes follow the effect: Citing the example of GHERARDO DA CAMMINO (the “good Gherardo” of Purgatorio 16, l. 124), Dante suggests hypothetically that if Gherardo’s grandfather were base, Gherardo himself would still be considered noble by all who knew him, even if they remembered the baseness of his ancestor—thus his nobility would have preceded its supposed cause. The fourth fallacy is that one might be considered noble after death who was not held so during life.

For all these reasons Dante rejects the idea that an ancient family name bestows nobility. In Chapter 15 Dante deals more specifically with the question of whether a man or a family line can change from base to noble. To assume that this is impossible involves two fallacies, he says. In the first if we assume that all men descend ultimately from ADAM, then all men are either base or noble, and the distinction between them is meaningless. In the second fallacy there was no single progenitor of humankind, but contemporary humans descended from many original ancestors, some noble, some base. This second precept Dante shows is false according to our faith, but also according to Aristotle and according to the “Gentiles” (classical pagans). The truth should, then, be clear to all sound minds. The chapter ends with a lengthy digression on possible sicknesses of the mind, which include in Dante’s view arrogance (the assumption that one already knows everything), weak-mindedness (the bestial condition of never seeking knowledge at all), and capriciousness (the tendency to jump around in one’s reasoning rather than following the rules of logic). People with these defects, in addition to those born with a mental handicap or those who are mad, may not understand, but everyone else will see the emptiness of this assumption about ancestry and nobility. Dante moves in Chapter 16 from his refutation of false notions of nobility to his discussion of what true nobility in fact is. Referring to stanzas 5 and 6 of his canzone, he first proceeds to define nobility in any created thing as the perfection of the virtue natural to that particular thing (referring the reader to Aristotle’s definition in the seventh book of his Physics). Dante rejects the opinion of some that the word noble is derived from the verb nosco (“to know”), and therefore the best-known example of anything is the noblest example. Instead, he says, the word is from non vile and thus means something that is “not base.” He then goes on to ask how to find nobility in human beings and asserts that this can be done by examining the fruits of nobility—moral and intellectual virtues. Citing the second book of Aristotle’s Ethics, Dante proceeds in Chapter 17 to stress that all moral virtues have a single source. Moral virtues,

Il convivio he says, lie completely within our power, and their source is the habit of good choice. Following Aristotle, Dante names 11 moral virtues: courage, temperance, liberality, munificence, magnanimity, honor, gentleness, affability, truth, good disposition, and justice. Some would include prudence among the moral virtues, but Dante leaves it out, agreeing with Aristotle that it belongs with the intellectual virtues. There are two vices related to each moral virtue. One of these vices is the lack of the virtue (as, for example, avarice may be the absence of liberality); the other is excessive practice of the virtue (as prodigality may be excessive liberality). Thus each virtue is a mean between two vices. The practice of virtue results in happiness, Dante claims. But there are two kinds of happiness, one pertaining to the active life and one to the contemplative life, and of these, the active life is good but the contemplative life is better. For this Dante cites both Aristotle (Ethics 10) and the story of Martha and Mary from Luke 10.38–42. The moral virtues, Dante implies, are those appropriate to the happiness of the active life. For the contemplative life one also needs to practice the intellectual virtues. In Chapter 18 Dante explains how through inference and probability it can be concluded that each of these several virtues proceeds from a single cause, and that is nobility. These virtues have in common an association with nobility, and so it must be concluded that either moral virtue or nobility is the cause of the other, or that both are caused by a third thing. But since all virtues have this same nobility in common, induction and common sense suggest that nobility is virtue’s cause. Dante moves to a discussion of his sixth stanza in Chapter 19. Nobility can be found wherever virtue is, he says, but virtue is not found wherever nobility is. Nobility also comprises good innate qualities (such as piety), honorable emotions (such as modesty), and bodily perfections (such as beauty). But the nobility of human beings produces so many and such varied fruits, Dante asserts, that in these ways it surpasses the nobility of the angels. In particular he mentions the emotion of shame: Shame is no virtue, but it is an emotion worthy of praise in women and in children since it denotes a dread

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of dishonor; hence it is a fruit of nobility, though it cannot be called a virtue. In Chapter 20 Dante proceeds to define nobility. Every virtue derives from nobility, he says; thus no one should claim to belong to nobility by race if he does not demonstrate virtue, the fruit of nobility. Instead nobility derives from grace and is thus a divine gift. But it is a gift imparted only to the soul disposed to receive it. The moral virtues, therefore, are the fruits of the nobility that God has granted the prepared soul—thus nobility itself may be defined as the seed of happiness and virtue divinely infused in a well-primed soul. Dante calls Chapter 21 a “special chapter”; indeed it is a difficult one, because in it he discusses how goodness descends into the human soul, first from the point of view of philosophy, then from the point of view of theology. The philosophical explanation relies heavily on Scholastic theories of the soul. The seed that falls into the human vessel delivers the power of the generative soul (that forms the human), the celestial soul (that gives life), and the combination of elements (earth, air, fire, and water) that produces the temperament. When the soul comes to life, it receives the possible intellect (the soul’s rational power that holds in potentiality the universal forms of nature). The purity of the created soul determines the degree to which the possible intellect and its virtues are realized. Dante follows this with a simpler theological explanation of the process. In his divine love God gives each of his creatures the greatest gift that creature is able to receive. These gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, knowledge, pity, and the fear of God (according to Isaiah 11.2). The mind’s desire is the first fruit of God’s seed of grace, and it must be carefully cultivated through good habits and temperance so that it becomes strong. In the long 22nd chapter Dante declares that these gifts are meant to be used well and says that he will now attempt to make his text useful by speaking more specifically about human happiness and where it lies, since those who do not understand where happiness exists cannot attain it. Following the opinion of Aristotle, he begins with the “appetite of the

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mind” (called hormen by the Greeks) mentioned in the previous chapter. This human appetite is derived from divine grace, Dante says, and in the beginning loves only itself. As it grows, it distinguishes between those things it enjoys most and least. Ultimately looking into itself, it loves those parts of itself that are most noble. Finding the mind to be its own noblest part, the human appetite delights most in the use of the mind. Dante denies that the sensual appetite is a part of the mind and insists that he is concerned only with the rational appetite. This appetite incites two uses of the mind—practical and speculative. The practical use includes the exercise of virtues like temperance and justice. The speculative use, however, characteristic of the contemplative life, is the nobler use of the mind and can only be perfectly realized in Heaven, where one can contemplate God directly, rather than (in this life) through his effects. To illustrate his point, Dante interprets the story of the three Marys at Christ’s tomb in Mark 16 allegorically, so that the women denote the three philosophical schools of the active life (the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics), the tomb is the present world, the Savior they seek is happiness. The Savior—happiness—is not in the present world but will go before them to Galilee (denoting contemplation). In Chapter 23 Dante begins the discussion of his seventh stanza and proposes to consider the signs through which a noble man can be recognized. He begins by asserting that nobility is manifest throughout the entire life of a noble man, giving perfection of his vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls. The majority of the chapter is spent discussing human life in general. Dante begins by asserting that, like the heavens whose influence affects our destinies, human life may be seen as moving in an arc—an ascent and a descent. The high point of the arc is typically reached in one’s 35th year. For this Dante cites the life of Christ, who died in his 34th year—and at “nearly” the sixth hour of the day, according to Luke (a fact Dante interprets allegorically as nearly the high point). The arc of life is divided into four parts, related to the four elements, according to Albertus Magnus: adolescence (hot and moist), maturity (hot and dry), old

age (cold and dry), and senility (cold and moist). These four ages also correspond to the four canonical hours of terce, sext, nones, and vespers. In Chapter 24 Dante more specifically addresses the four ages—adolescence, maturity, old age, and senility. Adolescence, he says, lasts until the age of 25, since until that time our rational part is not yet perfect. Maturity, the highest point of life, lasts for 20 years, so that the age of 35 is the midpoint of the mature life. Old age lasts from the age of 45 until 70. After that senility lasts for perhaps another 10 years, more or less. Among individuals these ages may vary slightly depending on one’s disposition, but the proportions will remain the same. Dante goes on to assert that nobility manifests itself in certain actions that are appropriate to each particular age. For adolescence these include obedience, sweetness, a sense of shame, and a loveliness of being. Dante ends the chapter with a lengthy digression on obedience, stressing that the young person should not be obedient to bad commands but should first obey his father, then teachers and elders to whom he is entrusted by the father. Dante continues the discussion of noble adolescent behavior in Chapter 25. One should be sweet and pleasant at this time, he says, in order to attract friends, as is best done through gracious speech and courteous actions. The noble soul will also have a sense of shame at this age, and Dante says that three emotions make up this sense. The first is awe—amazement at something seen or heard—which makes one reverent and ready to learn. The second is modesty—drawing back from repulsive things—which makes one restrained and temperate. The third is shame itself—the fear of disgrace—which makes one repent a misdeed and scorn to commit it again. As for the last quality, beauty of being, Dante refers here to the health and order of the body, which create a harmony and positively affect the soul. In Chapter 26 Dante explores the qualities of nobility that should appear in the age of maturity. In considering the inborn appetite he had introduced in Chapter 22, Dante says that this appetite must be guided by reason, so that temperance must guide the appetite and give it boundaries in its pursuit of its desires, while courage must limit

Il convivio the things the appetite wishes to flee. These qualities of courage or strength and temperance or selfrestraint are appropriate for the mature individual, and Dante cites Virgil’s depiction of Aeneas’s leaving DIDO (showing restraint) and entering Hell (showing courage) to illustrate the noble mature man. The mature individual should also show love, both of his elders because of what they have given him and of his juniors in order to benefit them. The truly noble mature person should be courteous and should also be loyal, in particular by following the laws. For all of these qualities Dante cites examples from the life of Aeneas. Chapter 27 delineates the qualities that the noble nature displays in old age. Citing Aristotle, Dante asserts that the noble individual should be useful not only to himself but also to others. One achieves one’s own perfection during the second age of life. In the third age one should use that perfection to enlighten the lives of others. Thus the noble individual in old age manifests the quality of prudence—the kind of wisdom that results in good counsel to others. One should also exhibit justice in one’s decisions in order to be an example to others. In ancient Rome this single quality was thought so appropriate to old age that their ruling body was named the Senate (from senes, meaning “old men”). Dante says that he plans to deal with justice more fully in the penultimate book of the Convivio and so is content merely to touch upon it here. One should also be generous at this stage of life, since now he is wise enough not to injure anyone (such as one’s widow or ward) through his generous acts. Finally, the old man should be affable and thus should speak of goodness—and hear it spoken of—with authority. As an example of an old man displaying all four of these qualities, Dante cites King Aeacus, who in Ovid’s story helped Cephalus of Athens in his war against Crete through his wisdom, justice, generosity, and affability. In senility the noble soul returns to God and blesses its life on earth. A natural death in old age, Dante affirms, is rest after a long journey and so should be approached by the noble soul without suffering or violent emotion. Divesting itself of worldly occupations, the noble soul anticipates being reunited with other souls in heavenly bliss,

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and with God. He mentions Lancelot and GUIDO DA MONTEFELTRO as two noble worldly men who entered the contemplative life at the end of their earthly days (though his opinion of Guido had clearly changed by the time he wrote Canto 27 of the Inferno). The noble soul also remembers the virtuous actions of its past life, which help it come to its rest with God. As the chapter ends, Dante considers the story of Marcia and Cato in the second book of Lucan’s Pharsalia. Marcia, who with his permission had left her husband, Cato, to marry Hortensius, begs Cato to take her back in her old age. Dante interprets this allegorically, claiming that Marcia represents the noble soul and Cato signifies God. In the age of senility the noble soul forsakes the demands of a noble but active life (represented by Hortensius). The noble soul, Dante concludes, wants to leave this world as the spouse of God. In Chapter 29 Dante deals with two possible questions that might arise concerning nobility. One might be from a certain prefect Dante names Manfred da Vico, who says that whatever his own qualities, he represents a family whose ancestors included many truly noble individuals. Thus Manfred himself is worthy of reverence as their representative. Dante answers this by saying that a worthless son or grandson only weakens the reputation of his ancestors and deserves only to be cast out, just as if he had deliberately defamed the noble men of his family. The second question might be from the San Nazzaro family of Pavia or the Piscitelli of Naples, who might say that because each man must be noble himself, no lineage can legitimately be called noble. Dante says that it is still possible to call a lineage noble, for just as a pile of grain looks white if the great majority of its individual grains are white, so a family may be said to be noble in the same manner. But the grains, not the pile, are the cause of the whiteness, just as the individuals, not the lineage, are the source of nobility. In the short final chapter Dante discusses the third part of his poem, the concluding stanza or tornada, through which, he says, he hoped to “ennoble and embellish” his poem. He addresses the poem itself, calling it his song Contra-li-erranti or “Against the erring ones.” He gives the song this title, he

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says, in emulation of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who entitled his summa opposed to non-Christians Contra Gentiles (Against the Gentiles). He tells the song to go forth and to show itself where the lady, philosophy, is to be found. Since she is found in the souls of all who love her, it is to them that he hopes his canzone will be of use. He says that he speaks of a “friend” of philosophy—that is, nobility, on whom philosophy focuses her loving gaze. Commentary Book 4 of the Convivio is quite different from the previous three books. For one thing it is in itself longer than the other three books combined, suggesting that Dante thought of his work in Book 4 as significantly more important than anything he had written up to that point—dealing with a topic that, in his view, was of enormous social, political, and moral significance for his time: the nature of gentilezza, or true nobility. In this the book is an important antecedent to the middle cantos of the Paradiso, in which Dante’s own noble ancestor, Cacciaguida, discusses the noble families of Florence. As John Scott points out (Understanding Dante 135), this book differs, as well, in its greater emphasis on divine grace and its more skeptical attitude toward human reason as the only guide to happiness. His radical allegorical interpretation of the visit of the three Marys to Christ’s tomb as suggesting that the philosophical schools of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Aristotle’s own Peripatetics cannot find happiness in this world is, Scott says, evidence of this change. The first truly significant aspect of this book occurs in Chapters 4 and 5, where Dante takes issue with the opinion of Frederick II concerning the definition of nobility as determined by ancient wealth and courteous behavior. Although he must refute the emperor, he does so while acknowledging the divinely sanctioned legitimacy of Imperial Roman authority. Remarkable as this is for a Florentine GUELPH, it is in fact Dante’s first important statement of the political theory he would develop in much greater detail in De monarchia (especially Book 2) and that lay behind much of his political discourse in the Comedy, most particularly Canto 6 of the Paradiso. In the first place a universal emperor is necessary for the stability of

human society, Dante argues, because an emperor, who has all things in his possession, could have no greater ambition and therefore would be the ideal authority to stifle the greed and hostile ambitions of others. But why such a monarch must be the Roman emperor is a different question, and Dante, having received a new view of Rome’s divinely ordained purpose from his close reading of Virgil, argues that Rome’s historical destiny was preordained—from the time of Aeneas, whose life corresponds with that of David and thus the messianic tradition—to become the empire into which Christ would be born, under Roman authority. These are new ideas for Dante, here presented without the polemical context of De monarchia or the Comedy, in which Imperial authority is set up as political opposition to the secular ambitions of the papacy. Another significant aspect of these early chapters, as Albert Ascoli contends (Ascoli 53–54), is his discussion of the meaning of the term author in Chapter 6. Since these chapters are concerned with the authority of the emperor and of Aristotle, Dante focuses on the term authority as meaning “pronouncement of an author” and finds two etymologies for the word author: the verb auieo (to tie words together) and the Greek autentin (worthy of faith and obedience). The meaning of authority, then, is the combination of these two definitions: “pronouncement worthy of faith and obedience.” This kind of authority applies both to Frederick as emperor and to Aristotle as philosopher. And the two kinds of authority need one another, since the emperor should rule with the advice of the wise, and since the wisdom of the philosopher can be of practical value only if backed by the authority of the emperor. But Ascoli argues that Dante has in mind, as well, poetic authority—the authority of his own vernacular canzoni, for which, if we take seriously his aim in the Convivio, the author Dante is claiming philosophical and hence political authority. Ascoli goes on to point out that the definition of nobility attributed here to Frederick II was, in fact, derived directly from Aristotle’s Politics and is so cited by Dante himself in De monarchia 2.3.3. Frederick seems to have in fact been more sympathetic with Dante’s own opinion, as a son-

Il convivio net attributed to the emperor and known to Dante demonstrates. Dante’s attribution of the false argument to the emperor here better enables the poet to assert his authority in both the political and philosophical spheres (Ascoli 55). Another aspect of this book that relates ultimately to Dante’s vision in the Comedy is his emphasis on desire or appetite, what he calls hormen. He introduces this intellectual hunger in Chapter 12 and focuses on it again in Chapter 22. In the human soul this natural appetite has as its object the Highest Good, but because its knowledge is imperfect, in the untrained soul it follows every object it sees, fixating on partial goods as if they are the Highest Good. In the Comedy, of course, this kind of mistaken pursuit of partial goods is the impetus for sin, as Virgil’s discourse in Canto 17 of the Purgatorio makes clear. The human soul needs to develop with sound rational guidance in order to grow in the right direction. But (as Dante says here in Chapter 22) even for those born into an evil environment or nature, it is possible to learn virtuous practices—to “graft” onto themselves the practices of better natures. When Dante finally defines nobility, after spending the first half of Book 4 refuting false definitions of gentilezza, he does so in a way that at first seems compatible with modern preconceptions: Virtue, not wealth or social rank, is the quality that enables us to call one noble. What is counterintuitive about Dante’s linking of virtue and nobility is his insistence that nobility must be present in a person as a precondition and cause of any virtuous behavior. Thus virtue is the effect of nobility, not its cause. Nobility is placed by God in the human soul like a seed, and the virtues that result from it lead to human happiness. Since the gracious embedding of the divine seed of nobility must occur in each individual separately, nobility is a quality of individuals, not families. This concept, too, influences the Comedy. The issue of family nobility, the question of why noble fathers sire ignoble sons, is central to the Valley of Princes in Purgatorio 7. There SORDELLO sums up Dante’s point in these chapters (Convivio 4.21 and 22) with the lines “Not often does the sap of virtue rise / to all the branches. This is His own gift, / and we can only beg that He bestow it” (ll. 121–123).

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The complicated Scholastic discussion of the origin of the human soul that Dante introduces in Chapter 21 (what he calls a “special” chapter, possibly because of its level of difficulty) is Dante’s first exploration of this thorny subject but is essentially the same description that he has PUBLIUS PAPINUS STATIUS give the pilgrim in Canto 25 of the Purgatorio: In it Dante rejects the opinions of the Arab philosophers Avicenna and Algazali (whom Dante would have known through Albertus Magnus’s summaries) that the soul is either noble or base by nature. He also rejects that of Plato, which held that the influence of the stars determined one’s nobility. Like Aquinas, he seems to have believed that there were certain innate qualities in the soul that developed in response to one’s education, training, and environment. As for the possible intellect, that cognitive part of the soul that Averroës had determined could not survive the death of the body (thus precluding individual immortality), Dante followed the opinion of Albertus Magnus in his assertion that this rational soul was united with the vegetative and sensitive parts of the soul. But each possible intellect is unique in what Dante calls its “distance” from its creator, God, the “First Intelligence.” Because of these varying distances, the individual capacity of all possible intellects are different, and this difference of necessity creates a hierarchy of human souls—a hierarchy related to the scale of being that Dante had discussed in Book 3 of the Convivio. This sort of hierarchy based on varying innate individual capacities is precisely the basis of the hierarchy of souls and of angels in Dante’s Paradise. One final point of some significance is Dante’s differentiation between the active and contemplative lives, introduced in the 17th chapter. Here he makes explicit his distinction between the two lives (represented, for example, by Rachel and Leah, and to some extent by Beatrice and Matelda, in the Comedy). The active life is good, but the contemplative life is better. In the present treatise, however, he seems content to focus on the active life, whose perfection depends on the exercise of the 11 moral virtues that he names (courage, temperance, liberality, munificence, magnanimity, honor, gentleness, affability, truth, good disposition, and

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justice). Most scholars believe that the remainder of the Convivio—from Book 5 through Book 15—was to have been concerned with these 11 virtues, one book per virtue (we know from his own testimony that Chapter 14 was to be devoted to justice). Thus the aim of the Convivio is to show how to lead the active life. This is not surprising, given the beginning of the text, in which Dante addresses an audience of people involved in such a life, who have not had the leisure to read philosophy themselves and to whom he speaks in the vernacular tongue. As for the contemplative life, Dante implies that perfection in this life depended on the exercise on the five intellectual virtues Aristotle proposed in his Ethics: wisdom, scientific knowledge, intuitive understanding, prudence, and technical skill. The fact that Dante includes prudence as one of the virtues of old age in Chapter 27 of the present book may suggest that he had begun to note some problems in Aristotle’s paradigm of active virtue. It is impossible to leave this commentary on Book 4 without mentioning the striking allegorical interpretation Dante gives to Lucan’s story of Cato of Utica and his estranged wife, Marcia. Having already extolled the saintlike virtues of Cato in Chapter 5 and having mentioned him again as the noblest representative of Zeno’s Stoic school of philosophy, Dante in Chapter 28 goes to the unimaginable extreme of using Cato allegorically to represent God, suggesting that no other human being is better suited to do so. In the act of love and forgiveness he performs in accepting Marcia back as his wife, Cato certainly acts in a godlike way from a contemporary view. But as Dante makes clear in the Purgatorio, where he makes Cato guardian of the mountain, it is his strict and rational moral judgment, unencumbered by emotion, that Dante appears to have most admired (in Purgatorio 1, ll. 88–90, his unmoved response to news of Marcia in Hell is somewhat startling). Still, calling Cato—a pagan suicide and an enemy of Caesar, the first divinely ordained emperor—more worthy to represent God than any other man, is a very strange remark for Dante. Perhaps it has something to do with the Stoic detachment from the world, which Dante may in this allegory equate with the contemplative life, to which Marcia (the human soul)

returns after marriage to Hortensus (the active life) in the fourth age, that of senility. Once again as his Convivio draws to a close, Dante uses an allegory to assert the superiority of the contemplative life over the active. This new interest in contemplation, in theological studies, may have contributed to Dante’s abandonment of what was, up to that point, his most ambitious project in 1306 or thereabout, and his commitment of his talents to a new and even more ambitious project that would incorporate a number of the themes he had explored in this work. That new project was the Comedy.

FURTHER READING Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 3 vols. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947–1948. Available online. URL: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ aquinas/summa.html. Accessed 24 July 2006. Ascoli, Albert Russell. “The Unfinished Author: Dante’s Rhetoric of Authority in Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, 45–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Dante Alighieri. Convivio, edited by C. Vasoli and D. De Robertis. In Opera minori, vol. I, part 2. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1988. ———. Dante’s Il convivio (The Banquet). Translated and edited by Richard H. Lansing. Garland Library of Medieval Literature. New York: Garland Press, 1990. ———. Dante: The Banquet. Translated by Christopher Ryan. Stanford French and Italian Studies, vol. 61. Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1989. Dronke, Peter. Dante’s Second Love: The Originality and the Contexts of the “Convivio.” Leeds, England: Maney and Sons, 1997. Foster, Kenelm. “Religion and Philosophy in Dante.” In The Mind of Dante, edited by U. Limentini, 47– 78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Gilson, Étienne. “Philosophy in the Banquet.” In Dante the Philosopher, translated by David Moore, 83–161. London: Sheed and Ward, 1948. Scott, John A. Understanding Dante. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. ———. “The Unfinished Convivio as a Pathway to the Comedy.” Dante Studies 113 (1995): 31–56.

Eclogues Took, John F. Lyric Poet and Philosopher: An Introduction to the Minor Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Troyato, Mario. “Against Aristotle: Cosmological Vision in Dante’s Convivio. Essays in Medieval Studies 20 (2003): 31–46.

Eclogues (ca. 1319–1320) The last occasional poems Dante wrote were two pastoral lyrics in Latin hexameter verse that formed part of a correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio, a professor of classics at the great university of Bologna. Although their authenticity has occasionally been questioned, most scholars accept them as genuine, particularly since GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO mentions them in his list of Dante’s works. There are five extant manuscripts of the Eclogues, which were not printed until the 18th century. Citations of the text of the eclogues in the following are to the Wicksteed and Gardner translation, available on the Princeton Dante Web site. In about 1319 Giovanni (called “del Virgilio” because he was known for his literary imitations of Virgil) had sent Dante, then living in RAVENNA, a verse epistle of his own, written in Latin hexameters, praising Dante’s talent but chiding him for writing the Comedy in the vernacular. Giovanni seems to be an early Italian humanist of the same bent as FRANCESCO (FRANCIS) PETRARCH, for whom the learned language of Latin was the only vehicle for serious literature. Dante has written about the “threefold fate” of human souls, says Giovanni, but he has written it in a language that the “unlettered folk” can understand so that his verse is “croaked out” on street corners by buffoons. Giovanni says that Dante has cast his pearls before swine. None of the classical poets, of whom Dante makes a sixth (clearly alluding to the passage in Canto 4 of the INFERNO in which Virgil, HOMER, HORACE (QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS), OVID (PUBLIUS OVIDUS NASO), and LUCAN (MARCUS ANNAEUS LUCANUS), invite Dante to join their number in Limbo) ever deigned to write in the vernacular. Giovanni begs Dante to write some verse in Latin for the learned

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clerks like him, preferably on some significant contemporary subject—here Giovanni lists a number of important current political events, couching them allusively in the language of classical myth— so that, for example, Paduans defeated by CAN GRANDE DELLA SCALA’s troops are referred to as “the Phrygian does torn by the stag-hound’s tooth.” Indeed if Dante were to write of these events— and do so in Latin—then he should earn a poetic crown. Giovanni, in fact, offers his own services to bring about such a coronation, proposing that he “present [Dante] to the applauding schools.”

ECLOGUE I Synopsis Taking his cue from Giovanni and responding with a pastoral eclogue in Latin hexameters in imitation of Virgil, Dante cleverly declines Giovanni’s offer of the poetic crown and his plea to write in Latin. In his poem Dante casts himself as the aged shepherd Tityrus and calls Giovanni by the pastoral name of Mopsus. The poem takes the form of a dialogue between Tityrus (Dante) and a young shepherd named Melibaeus (whom scholars have identified as Dino Perini, a fellow exiled Florentine with whom Dante was friendly in Ravenna). As the poem opens, Tityrus (Dante) and Melibaeus (Dino) are tending their flocks together, when Melibaeus asks Tityrus what Mopsus (Giovanni) has written to him about. At first Tityrus declines to answer, but finally he reveals that Mopsus has invited him to the lofty pastures of Maenalus (Bologna), where Mopsus currently plays his shepherd’s reed to great acclaim. Melibaeus expresses a desire to go to Maenalus and learn to sing these songs of Mopsus. But Tityrus refuses to go. In the first place, he says, Mopsus himself has grown pale in Maenalus and feeds himself only on the milk of song. Besides, he says, if he is to go anywhere to be crowned with the laurel crown, it should be beside his native ARNO (i.e., in FLORENCE). Melibaeus agrees but says that time is slipping away. Tityrus adds that the time will be right when he has completed his song of the spirits that dwell in the stars (i.e., the PARADISO). Then, he says, he will ask leave of Mopsus to be crowned. Why

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must Mopsus grant this leave?, asks Melibaeus, to which Tityrus responds that Mopsus has scorned the speech of his Comedy. Melibaeus asks how they may win him over, and Tityrus answers that he will send Mopsus 10 measures of milk from his choicest ewe (presumably 10 cantos of his Paradiso). Commentary The genre of Dante’s reply to Giovanni, the classical Latin eclogue, is modeled on Virgil’s 10 Eclogues (or Bucolics). These were pastoral poems, following the conventions established by the Greek poet Theocritus (third century B.C.E.), in which the characters are shepherds tending their flocks. Three conventional types of eclogue were the rustic dialogue, the shepherds’ singing match, and the lament for a shepherd who has died. Virgil’s first eclogue is a dialogue between two shepherds named Tityrus and Melibaeus. Melibaeus has lost his land to veterans of the army of Augustus, while Tityrus has appealed to authority and been allowed to keep his land. In his Fifth Eclogue Virgil presents a pair of dirges sung by two shepherds named Menalcas and Mopsus. Dante chooses to emulate Vigil’s style with a poem of 68 Latin hexameters, presenting a dialogue between two shepherds (and borrowing the names used in Virgil’s first and fifth eclogues, which he substitutes for the names of Giovanni and Dino, as well as his own). Allegorically the songs of Mopsus at Maenalus seem to be Giovanni’s lectures at the University of Bologna, while the milk on which Giovanni is nourished is the classical poetry he studies. Thus Dante’s gift of 10 cantos from his Paradiso—through which he seems to desire to win Giovanni’s respect for his use of the vernacular language—is allegorically presented as 10 measures of milk from his ewe.

ECLOGUE II Synopsis Giovanni replied to Dante’s poem with an eclogue of his own, modeled on Virgil’s Second Eclogue. He calls Dante a second Virgil and renews and intensifies his invitation for the poet to visit Bologna, where he will be given a grand reception and will be able to sing with Mopsus (Giovanni). If Dante refuses to come, Giovanni says, he will have to quench his thirst in the waters of Musone, a

river in Padua. This is probably an allusion to the Paduan writer Albertino Mussato, a composer of Latin tragedies in imitation of SENECA (LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA THE YOUNGER). Mussato is probably the person referred to in the poem as Muso, who Giovanni says will be in Bologna when Dante arrives. In fact Giovanni did send an eclogue to Mussato in 1327, and it was Mussato who eventually received the laurel crown. Dante’s response was his second eclogue, written in 97 hexameter lines to match Giovanni’s poem precisely. As Dante’s poem begins, Tityrus (Dante) and Alphesiboeus (probably the doctor Fiduccio de’ Milotti, given a pastoral name borrowed from a singing shepherd in Virgil’s Eighth Eclogue) enter a woodland to escape the heat of noon. Alphesiboeus (Fiduccio) begins the conversation wondering why Mopsus (Giovanni) enjoys living near the caves of the Cyclops at Etna (here representing Bologna). Before Tityrus answers, the young Melibaeus (presumably Dino Perini once again) runs up to them. Tityrus asks Melibaeus what news has made him run so hard, and before the winded youth can reply, his reed pipe begins to play a song. The song is in fact Mopsus’s renewed invitation—three notes short of the perfect 100, Dante says (referring to Giovanni’s 97 lines). This time it seems as if Tityrus is on the verge of accepting the invitation, when Alphesiboeus pleads with him not to go. For one thing, he would be deserting his flock and the dryads of their own grove (presumably Dante’s admirers in Ravenna). Dante replies that Mopsus has invited him out of sympathy for his exile from Pyraneus (Florence), and that he might be inclined to leave his flock if it were not for his fear of the brutal Polyphemus—the name of the Cyclops in the Odyssey. Alphesiboeus agrees that Polyphemus is indeed to be feared, with “his jaws familiar with the drip of human gore.” Alphesiboeus goes on to suggest that a laurel crown is coming for Tityrus, though it may be from the heavenly Virgin herself. Tityrus does not answer but silently assents to Alphesiboeus’s words. Commentary In his Second Eclogue Dante changes the setting of the action to Sicily, where Theocritus had invented the pastoral eclogue. Perhaps one reason

Epistles Dante does this is his introduction of the character of Polyphemus, the Cyclops, who with the other Cyclopes may be assumed to work at the forge of Mount Etna. But the one difficulty of this poem is the identification of Polyphemus. Since Etna here seems to be equated with Bologna, Polyphemus must represent some significant political figure of that city, whose politics would clash with Dante’s. Just who Polyphemus is probably depends on precisely when Dante wrote the second eclogue. If he wrote it in 1319, the chief candidate would be Ranieri di Zaccaria, who was the representative of Robert of Anjou in GUELPH Bologna from 1318 to 1319. Ranieri had pronounced a death sentence on Dante and his sons in 1315. If the poem was written in 1320 or later, the most likely allusion would be to Fulcieri da Calboli, capitano del popolo of Bologna in those years, whom Dante had condemned in PURGATORIO 14, ll. 58–66, for his brutal acts toward Whites and GHIBELLINEs. Just when Dante wrote his second reply to Giovanni is unknown. There is an extant note that has been attributed to Boccaccio indicating that Dante wrote the verse letter a year after receiving Giovanni’s second invitation, and that one of Dante’s sons sent the poem to Giovanni in Bologna after the poet’s death in September 1321. If this note is true, it may suggest that the second eclogue was the last poem that Dante ever wrote. Ultimately Dante’s Eclogues are significant for a number of reasons. First of all, as Chubb notes (776–777), they help to verify some biographical details—that Dante was content and had friends in Ravenna, that the first two canticles of the Comedy were well known in his lifetime, and that certain intellectuals, at least in Bologna, were critical of his use of the vernacular to write his great work. Second, they are Dante’s last homage to Virgil, the poet he most respected. Finally, they are the first pastoral poems in Europe since the time of Virgil himself and hence pointed the way for the pastoral conventions employed by Tasso, Spenser, Cervantes, Milton, and a host of others (Chubb 776).

FURTHER READING Chubb, Thomas Caldecot. Dante and His World. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1966.

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Davie, Mark. “Dante’s Latin Eclogues.” In Classical Latin Poetry/Medieval Latin Poetry/Gree Poetry: Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar, edited by Francis Cairns, 183–198. Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1977. Scott, John A. Understanding Dante. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Took, J. F. Dante: Lyric Poet and Philosopher: An Introduction to the Minor Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Wicksteed, Philip, and E. G. Gardner, trans. “Exchange of Latin Poems between Giovanni del Virgilio and Dante, ca. 1320.” In Testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana, edited by Ermenegildo Pistelli. Florence: Società Dantesca Italiana, 1960. Available online. URL: http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/ pdp/index.html. Accessed August 5, 2007.

Epistles (1304–1321) The 13 extant Latin epistles attributed to Dante are evidence that he was an active letter writer throughout his literary career. In the VITA NUOVA he mentions that he wrote a Latin epistle to the leading citizens of FLORENCE mourning the death of Beatrice in 1290. That particular letter has not survived, but the extant letters span his poetic career in exile. The fact that they are written in Latin indicates that these are not private letters we are reading. If any of Dante’s personal letters to his wife, GEMMA DONATI, or his children survived his exile, they are long since lost. These were intended for public consumption and are formally addressed to civic or political leaders, or to important contemporary scholars or fellow poets. They are literary and rhetorical works as much as one of his occasional lyric poems and are particularly important for Dante’s biography, in the way they reflect his alliances and political attitudes at various stages of his life in exile. Some of these letters are written on behalf of others—some aristocrat or political group he is representing. Some others accompany poems or other texts that he may be sending to acquaintances. The most important of these 13 letters are the five political letters he wrote in his own name

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(letters 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12) and his famous letter to CAN GRANDE DELLA SCALA (letter 13), in which he describes the allegorical method of the COMEDY and dedicates the PARADISO to the GHIBELLINE leader of VERONA. While there has been some controversy over whether the “Letter to Can Grande” is in fact genuine, most scholars today accept it as Dante’s. Quotations in the following commentary are from Toynbee’s edition.

EPISTLE 1 Synopsis The first epistle is addressed to Cardinal Niccolò da Prato, bishop of Ostia and Yelletri and the papal legate in TUSCANY. Dante writes not under his own name but in the name of the exiled captain Alexander, the council, and the entire White GUELPH party of Florence. He is writing in response to Cardinal Niccolò’s letter to the White party, delivered by a certain brother L. Dante begins the epistle apologizing for the tardiness of the Whites’ response. He goes on to say that they read the bishop’s letter with joy and are grateful for Cardinal Niccolò’s promise to heal their war-torn country. For what did they fight and bleed for, Dante asks, but for the chance to see those responsible for this civil war (i.e., the Blacks) forced to keep the peace. Their own purpose, Dante affirms, has always been only the peace and liberty of Florence. In fact, they cannot thank the bishop enough if his purpose is indeed to force their enemies to observe the obligations of good citizenship. It is beyond their own power to do so, but they hope God will reward the bishop for using his power in this way. Brother L., Dante acknowledges, has admonished the Whites to cease all acts of war and to submit themselves to the bishop’s judgment, which Dante says they willingly do. He ends by asking that the cardinal protect them like a loving father and promising that they will be obedient to him. Commentary This letter was written early in 1304. In January 1304 Pope Benedict XI had appointed Cardinal Niccolò “peacemaker” in Tuscany, Romagna, and the March of Treviso, and the cardinal had

arrived in Florence on March 10. In response to the cardinal’s contacting them, the White Guelphs here declare their willingness to submit themselves to Cardinal Niccolò’s authority and seem to hold out the hope of a peaceful return to their native city. But Cardinal Niccolò was less than successful with the Blacks and abandoned Florence on June 10, placing the city under papal interdict. When Pope Benedict died on July 7, the Whites’ hope for peaceful reconciliation died with him. This letter is the only record of Dante’s allying himself with the exiled White party. When the Whites attempted to fight their way back into Florence on July 20, Dante was not among them. By this time he seems to have abandoned them, having come to regard them as a “despicable, senseless company” in the words of CACCIAGUIDA (Paradiso 17, l. 62) and to have become a party of one (17, l. 69).

EPISTLE 2 Synopsis The second epistle is a letter of sympathy addressed to Counts Oberto and Guido upon the death of their uncle, Alessandro da Romena. In it Dante calls Alessandro his lord and predicts that the count’s memory will live long, as his noble soul will be rewarded in Heaven. Alluding to the motto on the count’s coat of arms—“We display the scourge that drives away vice”—Dante affirms that Alessandro truly lived his motto and drove vice away for the love of virtue. Dante calls for Alessandro’s family to lament, just as he laments himself, for he had consoled himself in exile through his hope in Alessandro. His consolation now, and that of the nephews, is that Alessandro has become a courtier in the heavenly Jerusalem. So he tells the nephews not to grieve too much and advises them that, as they have become the heirs of Alessandro’s earthly possessions, they should strive to be the heirs of his virtues as well. In the end Dante excuses himself for not appearing at the funeral, claiming that the poverty of exile has prevented his travel. Commentary Count Alessandro da Romena died in the spring or early summer 1304, which is the probable date for this letter. There has been some doubt as to the

Epistles authenticity of this letter, since the lavish praise of the deceased count contrasts sharply with his mention of the count in Canto 30 of the INFERNO (l. 77), where he is maligned as one of the four Conti Guidi of Romena who encouraged the counterfeiting activities of MASTER ADAM. But it is certainly possible that Dante had changed his opinion of the count by the time he wrote that section of the Inferno. The writer’s characterization of himself as a poor exile certainly fits Dante’s situation, and his motive for the letter may well be disappointment over the death of a possible patron. There may also be an attempt to curry the favor and awake the generosity of the new counts, whom he depicts as having inherited Alessandro’s wealth and, he hopes, the old count’s virtues—including, one might think, his generosity to poor exiles.

EPISTLE 3 Synopsis Dante’s third epistle is addressed to his friend and fellow exile CINO DA PISTOIA, in response to a SONNET Cino had sent him beginning, Dante, quando per caso s’abbadona (“Dante, when by chance to abandon”). In the poem Cino had proposed the question of whether it is possible for the soul to move from one passion to another, loving the second object with the same intensity as one loved the first. Dante answers that such a new passion is indeed possible and proposes to prove it both from rational argument and from authority. Our sensual faculties are not destroyed by a single act but remain ready for other acts, as long as the organ of sense is still intact. Love resides in the appetitive faculty, according to Dante, which is a sensual faculty. He leaves it to Cino to complete the syllogism. As for authority, Dante appeals to OVID (PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO), who in Book 4 of the Metamorphoses describes how Apollo, having deserted the nymphs he had loved before, sought a new love with Leucothoë. Dante includes a sonnet of his own with the letter, Io sono stato con Amore insieme (“I have been together with Love”—see RIME, number 86), in which he claims that the human will is powerless to reject a new beauty proffered by love. He concludes the letter with a recommendation that Cino read the Fortuitorum remedia (“Remedies

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of FORTUNE”)—a sixth-century work falsely attributed to SENECA—for consolation and patience in the face of the rigors of exile. Commentary Cino, the famous Pistoian poet and judge, was himself in exile from Pistoia between 1301 and 1306. Dante probably addressed this letter to him in 1305 or 1306. Cino, inspired by the learned poetry of the DOLCE STIL NOVO, gives Dante an intellectual puzzle to solve, inviting the scholarly kind of approach taken by Dante in the letter. Readers of the Vita nuova and the COMEDY may be surprised at Dante’s answer, since his attitude in those two texts is that true love remains true even after death. But there was clearly a time after Beatrice’s death when Dante forsook his earlier love (an abandonment she chides him for in Canto 30 of the PURGATORIO), and readers of the CONVIVIO will read canzoni originally addressed to the “gentle lady” whose love consoled him—a lady he identifies with Lady Philosophy in that work.

EPISTLE 4 Synopsis Dante’s fourth epistle is addressed to the Guelph captain MOROELLO MALASPINA of Valdimagra. He calls himself Malaspina’s servant and sends him his affection, excusing his failure to write sooner by claiming he has lost his freedom. He goes on to explain that when he left Malaspina’s court and reached the Arno, a woman appeared to him whose appearance dumbfounded him. Love, he says, laid hold of him and imprisoned him. Love destroyed the resolve he had taken to refrain from women, banished thoughts of philosophy with which he had been engaged, and ultimately enslaved his free will. Love now reigns within him, Dante says, and encloses an 84-line CANZONE to the same effect, beginning, Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia (“Love, since after all I am forced to grieve”—see Rime, number 89). Commentary The marquis Moroello Malaspina, hero of the Blacks’ victory at CAMPO PICENO in 1302, was nevertheless one of the generous Italian nobles who welcomed and protected Dante during his exile.

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When the pilgrim Dante meets Moroello’s cousin Corrado in Canto 9 of the Purgatorio, he expresses a heartfelt thanks to the Moroello family for their protection during the years 1306–07. Dante seems to have written this letter sometime late in 1307, after he had left Moroello’s court and was staying in the Casentino, the valley near the source of the Arno River. His description in this letter and poem of the irresistible force of love and the woman whose beauty strikes him like lightning suggests that he had not yet begun work on the Comedy, wherein love’s irresistible force is the excuse given by sinners in the second circle of the Inferno.

EPISTLE 5 Synopsis In his long and significant fifth letter Dante writes in his own voice to all the kings, dukes, marquises, and counts of Italy, as well as the senators of Rome and the Italian people. He writes to urge them to welcome to Italy HENRY VII OF LUXEMBOURG, the newly crowned Holy Roman Emperor. A new day is dawning, Dante says, that will mean the end of Italy’s calamities. Quoting the fourth beatitude, he claims that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied (Matthew 5.6), and that the iniquitous will be destroyed, for Christ, the “lion of Judah” (Revelation 5.5), has sent Italy a new Moses who will lead its people to the promised land. He calls Henry VII “Augustus and Caesar” and depicts him as a bridegroom on his way to wed Italy, his new bride. And when he arrives, Dante asserts, there will be a harvest of justice. Henry will be merciful to those who ask mercy but will destroy backsliders as Caesar destroyed Pompey at Pharsalia. Dante calls for the Lombards to put aside their savagery and recognize the authority of the Roman emperor, who is in the direct line of Troy and the Latins. The celestial eagle of Rome will destroy them otherwise. They should submit and acknowledge Henry’s authority, which is divinely ordained. He will set free the oppressed and turn Italy into a fruitful garden. He would rather forgive than chastise and demonstrates that the power of God flowers on earth through two sovereigns—the pope and the emperor. Both parties in Italy can look forward to

peace, Dante continues, if they stand and greet their king. All belongs to him—the mountains and rivers of Italy as well as the laws. In the last third of the letter Dante begins to present a case demonstrating that God specifically ordained the Roman emperor to be his secular representative on earth. A survey of world history from the fall of Troy to the reign of Augustus shows that God’s miraculous hand was present in shaping Rome’s destiny to create a single world empire. The result, ultimately, was the peace that reigned when Christ was made incarnate in human form. Furthermore Christ himself divided the world in two by advising that we should render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s (Matthew 22.21). Finally, Christ himself told Pilate that the earthly power the Roman governor wielded in the name of Caesar was from God (John 19.10–11). Dante’s conclusion, thus, is that God has ordained a king to rule over all mankind; that history and Scripture demonstrate that this sovereign is in fact the emperor of Rome; and finally, that Henry VII is the figure currently occupying that position, having received the blessing of POPE CLEMENT V in September 1310. The letter ends with Dante’s asking that the “lesser light”—that is, the moon—be allowed to shine where the spiritual light (the sun, representing the pope) is insufficient. Commentary Dante, choosing for himself the role of prophet in this rather astounding letter to all the princes of Italy, here expresses in brief form the theory he had been working out—beginning in the Convivio (4.4– 5) and proceeding through the entire text of DE MONARCHIA—that divine providence was behind the rise and prosperity of the Roman Empire. He develops this theme further in Canto 6 of the Paradiso, where the emperor JUSTINIAN I traces the history of Rome in more detail than Dante is able to do in this epistle. God had ordained that through Rome the world would experience universal peace and therefore be worthy to experience the birth of Christ. Further, the emperor was necessary for the kingdom of God to prosper, since only a world monarch (who owned everything and therefore could have no further ambitions) could curb the greed and ambition of other princes. Dante also

Epistles saw the emperor as the secular counterpart to the pope, and the sovereign who alone could stem what Dante saw as the disturbing growing trend of papal interference in secular affairs (something that, through the machinations of POPE BONIFACE VIII, had resulted in Dante’s own current state of exile). Dante saw Henry VII as the answer to Italy’s strife. The “two parties” he refers to here may be Guelphs and Ghibellines, or Blacks and Whites, or may even be exiles and usurpers. In any case an emperor with universal sovereignty would have the power to set right the divisions of the past and to check the power of the papacy. Henry had been elected emperor in November 1308 and in 1309 applied to Pope Clement to be crowned “king of the Romans,” after which he vowed to go on a crusade. With Clement’s approval, he announced that he would be crowned in Rome and would then devote his efforts to pacifying Italy. On September 1, 1310, Pope Clement issued an encyclical requiring that all of Italy should accept Henry as the true emperor, and when Henry subsequently led his army into Italy on October 23, Dante wrote this letter in his support. At the end of the letter Dante applies the conventional allegorical reading of the “two great lights” of Genesis 1.16 as the secular and spiritual powers, the secular represented by the moon as the lesser power. Dante was to revise this interpretation in Canto 16 of the Purgatorio (ll. 106–108), where he depicts the pope and emperor as two suns, rather than the sun and moon—indicating his rejection of the idea that the pope was in any way superior to the emperor, or that the emperor’s divine sanction was in any way inferior to that of the pope.

EPISTLE 6 Synopsis Dante’s sixth Latin epistle, written under his own name as an “undeserved exile” through the “scoundrels” in his home city of Florence, is a plea and a warning to his native land to accept the authority of Henry VII. He begins by asserting again that God had given the governance of human society to the Roman emperor and as proof suggests that when the Imperial throne is empty, chaos ensues in human affairs. He calls on all those whose presump-

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tion has led them to resist Imperial authority to quake before the emperor’s coming vengeance. The rebellious Florentines in their greed have flaunted the law of God and have denied due obedience to the emperor. But no matter how long Imperial sovereignty has been neglected, Dante declares, it cannot become obsolete. Whatever has been created for the good of all cannot be weakened without causing damage to all; thus to ignore Imperial sovereignty is contrary to God and nature. Dante compares the Florentines to builders of the Tower of Babel in their attempt to set their own authority up to rival that of the emperor. Why did they not also try to rival the papacy and duplicate the sun as well as the moon? The Florentines lack the fear of God, Dante says, which is the beginning of wisdom. He goes on to denigrate the new fortifications the Florentines had erected in 1310–11 in anticipation of an Imperial siege. The eagle of Rome is about to swoop down upon them, Dante says, and their defenses cannot stand against his power, which will destroy their false liberty and make them slaves. In a paragraph filled with anaphora (the rhetorical device using repetition with parallelism), Dante tells the Florentines that they will see their palaces destroyed, their populace divided, their churches pillaged, and their city given to the hands of strangers. Dante alludes to the fates of other Italian cities against previous emperors. He warns Florence not to take false courage from Parma, which in 1248 successfully repulsed an assault by FREDERICK II OF SWABIA. Despite that success, Parma subsequently had woes enough. But the Florentines should remember the fates of Milan and Spoleto, both destroyed by Frederick I (in 1157 and 1152, respectively). He calls the Florentines mad, by nature and by corruption and compares them to people standing inside a prison and fighting off anyone trying to free them. Blinded by greed, they are disobeying the most sacred laws, derived from natural law itself. They may think they are resisting the emperor for the sake of liberty, but Dante argues that true liberty is giving free and willing obedience to natural law. In the end Dante excoriates the Florentines as the barbaric progeny of FIESOLE. Henry is the

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elected leader of the Roman commonwealth, whose only ambitions are for the good of the whole world. With a quotation from Isaiah 53.4—“Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases”— Dante equates Henry with the Messiah himself (at least as the representative of Christ’s earthly governance). The time has come, he tells Florence, for repentance. But it is too late for them to escape punishment for their arrogance. Commentary The sixth epistle is dated March 31, 1311, and aimed at the Florentines who had organized the city’s resistance to Henry VII’s Imperial authority. Again in a letter filled with biblical quotations and allusions Dante assumes the role of prophet, foreseeing God’s judgment on the city for its presumption. When Henry had sent his ambassadors to Florence the previous year, they had presented a request that Florence abandon its siege of its perennial Ghibelline enemy, AREZZO. Now that Henry had crossed the Alps and entered Italy, the Florentines were refusing to give up their liberty and preparing for an Imperial attack. Dante argues once again that the Roman Empire is a divine creation and accordingly makes Henry a messianic figure, returning to claim the throne so long left vacant after the death of Frederick II (Dante did not consider any of the emperors after Frederick legitimate because they had ignored Italy and had not been crowned in Rome). He argues that liberty is not simply freedom from all law, but rather is the free acceptance of God’s will—a theme he would return to in the Comedy. And again he uses the allegorical interpretation of the “two lights,” asking whether Florence, which wants to set itself up as a second moon (i.e., secular authority), does not want to make of itself a second sun (ie., spiritual power) as well.

EPISTLE 7 Synopsis Dante addresses his seventh letter directly to Henry VII while the emperor was in Milan in April 1311. He calls Henry “King of Rome” and “ever Augustus,” and he writes in his own name but says that he also speaks for all Tuscans desirous of peace. He begins with language recalling the 136th Psalm,

which suggests he and his fellow exiles are like the captives in Babylon, waiting for the successor of GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR to restore justice and to sweep away the cruel tyranny of their native city, which, he implies, is in the power of Satan. He then alludes to Virgil’s famous FOURTH ECLOGUE, generally believed to predict the coming Messiah. But the emperor, to the consternation of Dante and his fellows, seems to have paused or retreated from his original purpose, leading the exiles to ask (as SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST had) whether Henry was indeed their prophesied savior, or whether they are to expect another. For his part Dante recalls his inner voice saying, when he witnessed Henry’s coronation in Milan as king of Lombardy, “Behold the Lamb of God.” Still Dante asks why Henry is neglecting Tuscany. The emperor’s power, he says (quoting Virgil’s AENEID), is not limited to a small section of Italy, nor even to the continent of Europe: Its only boundaries should be the ocean and sky, for that was how it was under Augustus. Dante then describes in some detail his theory that God chose to be incarnated in the Roman Empire because it had created peace. In being born in Bethlehem, Christ obeyed the edict of Augustus (that all the world should be enrolled). He would not have done so if it were not just to submit to the emperor’s decree. Dante actually calls shame upon the emperor for becoming entangled at Milan while the Florentine usurpers take comfort in his procrastination. He quotes Curio’s appeal to Caesar from Lucan’s Pharsalia, and Mercury’s appeal to Aeneas from Virgil’s epic, to stir the emperor into action. He looks forward to the reign of Henry’s son, John of Luxembourg, whom he compares to Aeneas’s son, Ascanius. But he warns Henry not to be like King Saul, who lost God’s favor when he failed to exterminate the Amalekites. He continues to chide the emperor for lingering in Milan through the winter and into spring. Trying to put down rebellions in Cremona, Brescia, and Pavia is like trying to kill the mythical Hydra, who simply kept growing new heads whenever Hercules lopped one off. To destroy the beast, the source of its life must be destroyed—and that source,

Epistles Dante insists, is Florence. He compares Florence to Amata, mother of Lavinia in the Aeneid, who resisted her daughter’s marriage to the Trojan and thus tried to block the will of God. Dante concludes the letter by charging the emperor, as the new KING DAVID, to destroy the new Goliath in the form of Florence. Only then can the exiles in Babylon return to the holy city of Jerusalem. Commentary On April 1, 1311, Florence had decreed that neither they nor any of their Guelph allies in Italy would allow Henry VII—whom they called the “King of the Germans” rather than emperor or king of Rome—to enter any of their territories. Dante wrote this seventh letter from the Casentino Valley, source of the Arno, on April 17, 1311, a little more than two weeks after his letter to the leaders of Florence. Henry had been in Milan since December 23, though he was to leave two days after Dante penned his epistle. Cremona and Brescia had already rebelled in February and March, respectively, and Henry needed to set off to quell those revolts. Once again as he had in his previous two political letters, Dante uses imagery drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid, a text that by this time had attained for Dante something like the status of Scripture, and that prophesied the divinely ordained authority of the Roman emperor. More important Dante speaks here in the voice of an Old Testament prophet, unafraid to chastise his leader when he believes his sovereign has strayed from divine intent, as Samuel had chastened Saul. Further Dante fills his letter with messianic allusions, calling Henry the new David, the savior of the Babylonian exiles, the subject of Virgil’s prophetic Fourth Eclogue. In one paragraph he twice alludes to words of John the Baptist, first in having the exiles ask whether Henry was the prophesied one, or whether they were to wait for another (a question John had asked Jesus in Matthew 11.3), and second when he himself thinks, “Behold the Lamb of God” upon first seeing the emperor (as John had when seeing Christ in John 1.29). Thus Dante puts himself in the role of SAINT John the Baptist, last of the prophets, immediately preceding the Messiah in the form of Henry.

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Dante did not see this as blasphemous: If the pope, descended from SAINT PETER, wielded the power of Christ in his role as spiritual authority of the world, the emperor wielded the power of Christ in his role as secular authority in the line of David. That Dante was beginning to see these two roles as equal is evident in his reference to Henry as “our Sun”—no longer does he think of the secular power as the “lesser light” of Genesis, as he had in his previous epistles.

EPISTLE 8 Synopsis Dante’s eighth letter, as well as his ninth and 10th, are directed to the wife of the emperor Henry VII, the Lady Margaret (whom he calls “Queen of the Romans” and “Augusta”), in the name of the countess of Palatine, with whom Dante was staying at the time. In this brief letter and in the countess’s name he thanks the Imperial consort for writing to her. The countess received the letter in joy and devotion and protests her unworthiness to receive the honor of a letter from Lady Margaret, asking after her health. But though she is not worthy, the countess says that such generous acts by the Imperial family are to be expected, since Lady Margaret and the emperor should serve as exemplars of behavior to lesser mortals. The countess ends the letter praying that God will reward Lady Margaret for her generosity and condescension and (with an allusion to Virgil’s contention and Dante’s belief that God had created the empire for the good of all mankind) prays that Henry will be successful in restoring Imperial authority. Commentary Dante was staying with the countess of Palantine’s husband, Count Guido di Battifolle of Palatine, in the Casentino Valley during most of the years of Henry VII’s sojourn in Italy, and the count was a strong advocate of Henry’s Italian program. Scholars have long assumed that Dante acted as the countess’s secretary in these three Latin epistles to the emperor’s wife, chiefly because they know of his presence at the Battifolle court and because of the learned allusions in the letters, including the allusion in this Eighth Epistle to Dante’s idol, Virgil, and his favorite doctrine of the divinely ordained

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authority of the Roman Empire. Lady Margaret died in Genoa on December 14, 1311, and it seems likely that these three letters were composed after Henry’s entrance into Italy in October 1310. The letters therefore were probably written between those two dates.

EPISTLE 9 Synopsis Like the previous epistle, this ninth letter is written from the countess Palatine to Augusta, Lady Margaret, presumably through Dante as composer of the letter. Once again the countess thanks the queen for her letter, saying that words cannot express her joy and reverence. She is glad to hear of the progress being made by the queen and her husband. Still although that news is welcome, the countess holds larger hopes for the future, when still greater things will have been accomplished. God, she says, has ordained that a single ruler should have authority over all mankind, and she hopes that Henry and Margaret’s (or Caesar and Augusta’s) reign will not be hindered from this purpose. She closes the letter by committing herself to Augusta’s mercy and praying that the queen keep the countess in the protection of her shadow. Commentary The ninth letter was clearly written after the eighth, and it suggests an ongoing correspondence between the countess Palatine and Lady Margaret. Here the countess expresses her pleasure at what she had been told about the successes of Henry’s Imperial agenda. Once again the allusion in the epistle to Dante’s belief in the importance of a single world ruler, an idea to which he had devoted the whole of his treatise De monarchia, is a good indication that Dante may have been the composer of the epistle.

EPISTLE 10 Synopsis The 10th epistle, addressed to Lady Margaret from the countess Palatine, is little different from the other two. Once again the countess expresses joy at having received the queen’s missive. Once again she declares that she and her husband rejoice in the positive fortunes of the Imperial pair, and the count-

ess expresses her conviction that the hand of God is in it. She then begs the queen to allow her to become a petitioner, but what the countess asks is only that the queen examine carefully the sincerity with which the countess is devoted to her. In the fourth paragraph the countess responds specifically to the queen’s request that if a messenger can be found, the countess will send her an account of the count and countess’s condition and circumstances. The countess here assures the queen that she and Count Battifolle are both prospering and in good health, as are their children, and that they rejoice in the progress being made in the Imperial cause. The letter was sent from the castle Poppi on May 18, 1311. Commentary Like the other two letters from the countess Palatine, this one does little more than express the courtesies expected from a countess addressing her queen. It lacks the direct allusions to Dante’s favorite arguments that appear in the Eighth and Ninth Epistles, but it does express the belief that God is behind the Imperial successes in Italy—though that sentiment might as easily have been expressed by the countess herself without Dante’s help. Of particular interest here, though, is the specific note that the letter was sent from Poppi, Battifolle’s castle in the Casentino, allowing us to pinpoint Dante’s residence at this time in his exile.

EPISTLE 11 Synopsis Dante’s 11th Latin epistle is directed to the cardinals of Italy, who had convened in Carpentras after the death of Pope Clement V on April 20, 1314. He begins with a quotation from Lamentations 1.1: “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations!” When the greed of the Pharisees had destroyed the Levite priesthood and brought about the destruction of Jerusalem, God inspired Jeremiah to make this lament over his fallen city, Dante says. Such is the current state of Christianity in Dante’s eyes, since those whom Peter had entrusted to feed the sheep have left the Apostolic See widowed and abandoned. Thus, as Jeremiah had, Dante has arrived to lament.

Epistles He says that even the Jews and Saracens look at the current state of the church and ask, “Where is their God?” Dante condemns false prophets for claiming that the current situation has come about through necessity, when in fact the cardinals’ own free will has caused it. Calling the cardinals the centurions of the Church Militant, Dante uses the metaphor of the church as a chariot (as he does in the last cantos of the Purgatorio) and compares the cardinals to Phaëton, who drove the chariot of the sun to destruction. The cardinals have placed the church on the brink of devastation. Saying the cardinals in their greed have turned their back on the church, he compares them to the moneychangers whom Christ drove from the Temple. The specific precipice to which the cardinals have steered the church is that they, as Demetrius in the books of Maccabees, have consented to the priesthood of Alcimus (the Hellenizing high priest who broke the true line of the Levite priesthood). Some may claim that Dante is committing the sin of Uzzah, who put out his hand to steady the Ark of the Covenant while it was being moved, thus violating a divine prohibition, and was struck dead for his presumption (1 Samuel 7.1). Dante protests that, far from being presumptuous, he is one of the least of the sheep and is inspired to speak up only because of his zeal for God. He is like the blind man of John 9.1–41, who proclaims the truth that the Pharisees sought to suppress. He also cites ARISTOTLE, who advised that truth is more important even than friendship (Ethics 1.6). As for Uzzah, Dante says he has no intention of touching the Ark (i.e., the church), only of stopping the oxen (i.e., the cardinals) from pulling it over the cliff. Dante goes on to condemn the Italian prelates as a whole, accusing them all of having married themselves to greed. Neither charity nor justice is the daughter of the church anymore. Instead the church has taken the daughters of the horseleech as her daughters-in-law—here Dante alludes to Proverbs 30.15: “The leech has two daughters; ‘Give, give,’ they cry” (NRSV). He chides the cardinals for ignoring the church fathers—Gregory, Ambrose, SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE, the Venerable Bede, and others—because

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they looked for the highest good, while the current leaders of the church look only for personal gain. Dante goes on to declare he is no phoenix (of whom there was never more than one in the world). Rather, he says, everyone thinks as he does, but none has the courage to speak. Dante tells the cardinals they should be ashamed, adding that shame leads to repentance, which then leads to amendment. To make them feel this shame, he reviews for the cardinals the present state of Rome, bereft now of both its lights (not only had the pope died, but the emperor Henry VII had succumbed to malaria on August 24, 1313). The cardinals should hold Rome in reverence, first because they are Italian and it is the cradle of their civilization, and second because it is the source of their being as men of the church. They should grieve for Rome’s desolation more than the rest of the Italian people, because they have been the cause of its eclipse. In particular Dante singles out the cardinal Napoleone Orsini, whose influence had elected Clement V to the papacy and thus brought about the removal of the papal court to Avignon. In his last paragraph Dante urges the cardinals to put the chariot of the church back on its true course and to fight for Rome as the seat of the true bride of Christ. The Italian cardinals must struggle against the greedy usurping Gascons and return the papacy to Rome. Commentary As he had in his earlier political letters (Epistles 5, 6, and 7), Dante once again takes on the voice of a prophet, here asserting the importance of returning the papacy to Rome from Avignon, where Clement V had moved the papal see. With Clement and Henry VII both dead, Dante saw a crisis in the church and in Rome, which in his political philosophy had been divinely sanctioned as both the political and spiritual center of the world. The opening quotation from Lamentations seems to have been one of Dante’s favorites, since he cited it earlier in Chapters 27 and 30 of his Vita nuova, there in reference to the widowed city of Florence upon the death of Beatrice. His use of the quotation here in this letter seems much truer to

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the context of the verse, since the lament of Jeremiah was for the loss of the holy city. The cardinals, who convened in Carpentras, did not elect a successor to Clement for more than two years, during which the papal see remained empty. When a new pope was elected, he was certainly not to Dante’s liking. The new pontiff was POPE JOHN XXII, who not only kept the papal court in Avignon but was perhaps even more corrupt than Clement had been, so that in the PARADISO Dante took the unheard-of step of unambiguously denouncing the sitting pope (in Canto 18, l. 130) for using excommunication as a political tool. Ultimately the severity of Dante’s tone and his constant use of scriptural allusions combine to make this letter a scathing attack on the leadership of the church. Considering the outcome of the cardinal’s conclave, the epistle seems to have had little or no effect on the cardinals, even if they actually read it.

EPISTLE 12 Synopsis Dante’s 12th letter is addressed to “a friend” in Florence, one who had apparently written to Dante about an opportunity being proffered for him to return home to his native city. He expresses gratitude to this friend (whom he calls “my Father”) for his efforts in persuading the commune to overturn Dante’s banishment. However he tells his friend that he has also received a letter from their mutual nephew to the effect that Dante might return to Florence if he pays a fine, and that he “submit to the stigma of the oblation”—that is, a ceremony in which he would have to enter the Baptistry of San Giovanni wearing sackcloth, which would indicate an admission of his guilt. This, Dante says with severe irony, is the reward of his innocence, which all the world recognizes. As a student of philosophy he refuses to perform the oblation. As an advocate for justice he refuses to pay a fine to those who unjustly exiled him. He will not return to Florence this way, he says, though he will not refuse a later invitation that does not taint his honor. Nor, he says, does he need Florence. He will not starve in exile.

Commentary The “friend” to whom Dante was writing in this 12th letter has not been conclusively identified. The internal evidence of the letter suggests, first, that he was a man in holy orders (thus the “my Father”), and second that he was someone related to Dante, since he says that they have a nephew in common. The best candidate may be Dante’s brother-in-law, Teruccio di Manetto Donati, brother of Dante’s wife, GEMMA DONATI. Teruccio is known to have belonged to a religious order, and he and Dante would both be uncles to Niccolò Donati, son of Gemma’s other brother, Forese di Manetto Donati. It is likely that Dante is writing in response to the amnesty announced in Florence on May 19, 1315. That amnesty would have applied to Dante and his sons, but it required that exiles pay a fine and engage in the humiliating oblation ceremony at the baptistry. Dante must have written this letter in late May 1315, or just after his 50th birthday. Clearly he longed for home, but his pride and his sense of justice would not allow him to accept the degrading terms of the offer. Although three more offers of amnesty were issued by the Florentine government between June and December 1316 (possibly in response to the Guelph defeat by the Ghibellines at the Battle of Montecatini in August 1315), these later proclamations specifically excluded Dante as well as others who had been exiled by the podestà Cante de’ Gabrielli. Thus the May 1315 pardon, which he fervently rejects here, was to be Dante’s last chance to return home.

EPISTLE 13 (“LETTER TO CAN GRANDE”) Synopsis Dante begins the lengthy “Letter to Can Grande” by addressing the epistle to Lord Can Grande della Scala, whom he calls the “Vicar-General” of Verona, a province of the emperor, calling himself Can Grande’s “Most devoted servant.” Of himself Dante says he is a Florentine by birth but not by disposition—an expression of disgust with the politics of his native city. Having heard the wide fame of Can Grande, which uplifts some and casts down others, Dante

Epistles says he decided to test the truth of this reputation and traveled to Verona, where he saw firsthand Can Grande’s magnificence and received his bounty and thus became the lord’s servant and friend. He does not feel presumptuous (despite what the opinion of the “common herd” might be) in calling himself Can Grande’s friend, since the friends of princes are often obscure but virtuous men. Further Dante cites Scripture to the effect that those with wisdom are friends of God (Wisdom 7.14, NRSV). In order to reciprocate the friendship that Can Grande has shown him through his bounty, Dante has sought to find a gift worthy of his great benefactor. He has found nothing more appropriate to offer, he says, than the third canticle of his Comedy, the Paradiso, which he includes with this letter and hereby dedicates to Can Grande. Having completed what needs to be said in epistolary form, he says, he will now assume the role of commentator and provide for Can Grande an introduction to his poem. After a brief discussion of how parts relate to the whole, and how it is necessary to know the truth of the whole in order to know the truth of its parts, Dante proceeds to provide an introduction to the Comedy as a whole to make it easier to understand the Paradiso itself. There are six questions that must be considered in approaching such a text, Dante says: the subject, the author, the form, the aim, the title, and the branch of philosophy to which the text belongs. Subject, form, and title must be considered separately, he says, since they will differ in reference to the part from their meaning in reference to the whole. Dante begins with perhaps the best-known part of this epistle: He asserts that the sense of his poem is not simple but rather “polysemous.” Events in the poem have both a literal meaning and other meanings that are allegorical or mystical. By way of illustration he chooses the biblical passage from Psalm 114.1–2: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language; Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion.” On the literal level Dante says this denotes the Israelites’ escape from Egypt under Moses. Allegorically the verse refers to our redemption by Christ, Dante says. On a moral level the verse suggests the soul’s

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conversion from sin into a state of grace. Finally, anagogically the soul’s passing from the corruption of the physical world into the eternal glory of Heaven is suggested. All three of these mystical meanings, Dante says, can be called “allegorical” in the general sense of the term. This being understood, Dante declares that the subject of his poem is twofold: On the literal level the subject is the state of human souls in the afterlife. Allegorically the poem concerns how human beings, through the exercise of their free wills, merit just reward or punishment. The form of the poem, then, is also twofold, including the form of the treatise itself (three canticles, each divided into 33 cantos, each divided into rhymed lines) and the form of the treatment (which is “poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, and figurative” and also “definitive, analytic, probative, refutative, and exemplificative”). The title of the work, Dante says, is “the Comedy of Dante Alighieri,” and he adds that the term comedy is derived from the words comos (village) and oda (song), thus comedy means “a rustic song.” Unlike a tragedy, which begins with something admirable but ends with something foul or horrible, comedy begins in an unpleasant situation but ends happily. In terms of language tragedy uses the sublime, while comedy uses lowly or everyday language—although Dante cites HORACE (QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS) to the effect that the language of comedy may sometimes rise to the level of the tragic. Considering the Paradiso specifically, Dante says that the subject is more specifically the state of blessed souls after death. Allegorically the subject of the Paradiso is how human beings justly merit the reward of eternal bliss. Its form is twofold, consisting of cantos and poetic lines. The title of this part of the Comedy is Paradiso. Dante now turns to the other three points. The author of both the whole and part is he. The aim of both the entire Comedy and the Paradiso specifically is, Dante says, to assuage the miseries of suffering humanity and give them happiness. As for the branch of philosophy to which the text belongs, Dante puts it in the realm of ethics or morals. Parts of the text, to be sure, are written in the manner of

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speculative philosophy, but there is always a practical purpose to those sections. From these questions Dante moves to a discussion of the literal sense of the text. The Paradiso, he says, falls into two parts: the prologue and the executive part. The prologue itself might be termed an exordium, since as an orator’s exordium does, it introduces what is about to come, but as a work of poetry it also includes an invocation. Thus the prologue to the Paradiso can be divided into two parts, one of which forecasts what is to come, the other of which invokes Apollo. Quoting MARCUS TILLIUS CICERO, Dante says that a good exordium should gain the audience’s favorable feelings, attention, and willingness to learn. In the case of the Paradiso, Dante says, the value of what he will be told (the joys of Paradise) gains the reader’s favorable disposition. The unusual subject matter (the conditions of Heaven) attracts the reader’s attention. And the fact that the subject is possible (since the narrator says he will speak of what he can remember, suggesting that the reader will be able to retain some of the vision as well) renders the reader willing to learn. Dante then spends several paragraphs proving the truth of his very first statement in the Paradiso: “The glory of the One Who moves all things / penetrates all the universe, reflecting / in one part more and in another less” (Canto 1, ll. 1–3, Musa trans.). This is proved by reason. Everything that exists must take its being from itself or some other being. God is the only self-created being, so everything is from him, either directly or medially. Dante then makes the same argument for essence and virtue that he does for existence. Thus divine goodness, wisdom, and virtue do shine in every part of the universe. Having proved this by reason, Dante then turns to authority, quoting Jeremiah, the Psalms, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus, as well as Lucan, to prove God’s presence and power throughout the universe. Dante moves on to discuss how the narrator, after his opening statement, professes to have been in the highest Heaven. This Dante defines as the Empyrean, the Heaven of fire and heat (a spiritual fire, Dante asserts). He goes on to prove in two ways that the Empyrean receives more divine

light than any other place. The Empyrean is related to all other things as cause is related to effect, and as the highest of these secondary causes, the Empyrean receives the light of the first cause, God, most directly. Second, all things that have motion are defective in some sense, because they have not attained what they are moving toward. Only in the Empyrean Heaven is there no motion, because it is in a perpetual state of perfection, and perfection, Dante says, is a “ray” of God. Once again Dante follows these arguments with support from authorities, citing Aristotle and Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, going on to quote Paul’s claim in 2 Corinthians that he has been to the highest Heaven and is incapable of remembering or relating all that happened there (2 Corinthians 12.2–5). He further cites the transfiguration scene in Matthew (17.1–8) and the scene in Ezekiel wherein the prophet falls on his face after seeing a vision of God (1.28). Dante further cites Richard of Saint Victor, Saint Bernard, and Saint Augustine concerning the inexpressibility of holy things. If readers do not believe the narrator’s claim to have seen such lofty things, Dante tells them to read Daniel, where even the sinful Nebuchadnezzar is granted a vision for the edification of sinners and subsequently forgets the content of the vision. Nebuchadnezzar had neither the knowledge (because he had forgotten) nor the power (because he could not find the words) to express his experience. Citing PLATO as an authority, Dante affirms that there are many things that the intellect perceives that language is unable to express. Dante moves on to discuss the invocation to Apollo that begins in line 13. Once again Dante divides this invocation into two parts, the first of which asks for the deity’s inspiration, and the second of which promises recompense to the deity for that help. First, the narrator prays for Apollo’s aid, then he explains his need for such help. Dante says that he will not explain more specifically on the present occasion and hopes that Can Grande will give him the opportunity to continue his exposition at a later time. As for the “executive” part of the poem—the entire remainder of the canticle—Dante says only that the structure of it will be an ascent from heaven to heaven, and

Epistles the subject will be the spirits in Paradise, whose whole bliss consists of the apprehension of God. And the work, Dante says, will end in God himself, the beginning and the end, after which nothing more need be sought. Commentary The “Letter to Can Grande” is divided into three clearly delineated sections. The first four paragraphs are Dante’s epistolary salutation, expression of admiration and gratitude, and dedication to Can Grande. Paragraphs five through 16 provide an introduction to the Comedy as a whole and the Paradiso in particular, considering the subject, form, title, author, purpose, and branch of philosophy to which the text belongs. Finally, paragraphs 17 to 33 give a close commentary on the first several tercets of the Paradiso and invite Can Grande to subsidize a longer and more complete commentary on the entire poem. The most controversial question concerning the 13th epistle is the question of its authenticity. Although nearly all scholars accept the genuineness of the first four paragraphs of the letter, the authenticity of most of the text has been questioned for hundreds of years. Indeed the letter was not specifically identified as Dante’s until the early 15th century. In 1903 Edward Moore wrote a comprehensive article called “The Genuineness of the Dedicatory Epistle to Can Grande” that allowed Toynbee to say, in his 1920 edition of the Epistles, that the matter could now be regarded as settled. Toynbee was overly optimistic. In Georgio Brugnoli’s 1979 edition of the letter Dante’s authorship of the epistle was called into question again. One of the difficulties with accepting the letter as genuine is that of the six extant manuscripts of the epistle, the three earlier manuscripts, all dating from the 15th century, contain only the first four paragraphs, while the two other parts of the letter appear only in the three later manuscripts, all from the 16th century. It is true, however, that each of the earlier manuscripts contains a transitional passage at the end of the fourth paragraph, indicating that a much longer commentary section is to come—in other words, it is clear that those manuscripts are incomplete.

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Other new challenges to the epistle’s authenticity were soon to follow. Peter Dronke questioned the letter’s genuineness on the basis of the Latin prose style, noting that the use of the cursus—regular accentual phrase endings characteristic of classical Latin—is far less frequent after the fourth paragraph here than in Dante’s other letters. But as Robert Hollander points out, the text changes from an epistle to a commentary after paragraph four—a completely different genre. Further Hollander argues that the use of the cursus in the later part of the 13th epistle is quite similar to its use in Dante’s Latin treatise DE MONARCHIA (43–53). In general Hollander’s recent lectures on the “Letter to Can Grande” have dealt with the most serious objections to Dante’s authorship. Mazzoni’s research, which Hollander draws on, did much to show that the earliest commentators on the Comedy were familiar with the letter, thus demonstrating the likelihood that the letter was written prior to the commentaries. The use of Dante’s terminology (e.g., canto, canticle) and the epistle writer’s clear familiarity with the Convivio and with De monarchia also strongly suggest that the letter is Dante’s. Ultimately the letter is certainly in the spirit of Dante’s poem and its designs. It is unlikely that Dante’s authorship of the epistle to Can Grande will ever be proved beyond a doubt, but most scholars currently seem ready to accept the probability that the letter is genuine. Another point of scholarly contention is the date of the letter. The salutation addresses Can Grande as victoriosissimo—that is, “most victorious”—Lord, and as the Imperial vicar-general. Toynbee assumed that the letter must have been composed before August 25, 1320, when Can Grande suffered a disastrous defeat at Padua, after which it would have been inappropriate to address him as victoriosissimo. But after 1318, when Can Grande won a great victory at Cremona and was elected captain general of all Ghibelline forces in Lombardy, the epithet would have been most fitting. Thus Toynbee believes 1319 to be the most likely date for the epistle (163). But other factors being equal, it seems far more likely that Dante composed the letter between 1315 and 1317, when he was a guest of Can Grande’s at

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Verona, than in 1319, after he had taken refuge in RAVENNA. Since Can Grande had conquered Vicenza in April 1311 and was appointed Imperial vicar by Henry VII in 1312, it was quite apt to call him victoriosissimo by 1315. A problem with the earlier date, of course, is that Dante would not have made much headway in writing the Paradiso even by 1317. But although Dante says in his third paragraph that he dedicates and offers the Paradiso to Can Grande, there is no reason to assume that what accompanied the letter was the complete text. Indeed the commentary simply refers to the two parts of the poem as the introduction and everything else, and Dante proceeds to comment only on the first 27 lines of Canto 1. When Dante speaks of the remainder of the poem, he speaks in the future tense: “The process of the narrative will be by ascent from heaven to heaven,” he says in paragraph 33. It is quite possible that the letter was written in 1315, soon after Dante’s arrival in Verona with only a canto or two of the poem written, and with the intent of securing Can Grande’s patronage. Indeed the letter could have been composed any time between 1315 and 1317 or even, to give Toynbee his due, any time up to 1320. The letter’s most important points are its characterization of the Comedy as “polysemous,” and its assertion that the poem should be read—as is Scripture—as both literal (or historical) and allegorical (or mystical). The three separate mystical senses—the allegorical (which we might call typological), the moral, and the anagogical—are the same as those discussed by SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS (ST 1, q. 1, a. 10) and so should be no particular surprise to any reader. Dante’s use of the passage from Psalm 114 is also no accident, since it is a verse of special significance in the Purgatorio, as the psalm being sung by the souls of the redeemed as they arrive on the shores of Purgatory. Indeed it is precisely scenes like this one in Purgatorio that led Barolini to remark that the question of the authenticity of the “Letter to Can Grande” is moot: The poem itself teaches us how to read it allegorically, so the instructions provided in the epistle really are not necessary. The definitions of comedy and tragedy provided in paragraph 10 are another significant aspect of

this letter. This paragraph, too, has caused some controversy (see Kelly). For one thing the letter uses Seneca and Terence as examples of tragedy and comedy, respectively, whereas Dante might have been expected to use Virgil and himself as examples, as he does in the Comedy itself. But it hardly seems likely that in a paragraph where he was trying to show in what sense his work was a comedy he would define comedy as being a work like his. Another aspect of the definition that has disturbed some readers is the description of the language of comedy as “unstudied and lowly.” Surely Dante employs the most sublime heights to which his Italian vernacular could soar to describe the heavens of Paradise. Still the poem is in the vernacular (albeit the “illustrious vernacular” of which he speaks in DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA) and in that sense may be “unstudied.” Further at least parts of the poem—the “gargoyle cantos” of the Inferno, for instance (Cantos 21–22)—employ a very “lowly” language that Dante would have known was inappropriate for tragedy. Nothing in the letter requires that the language be uniformly low throughout the comic text. One final point worth noting is the manner in which Dante discusses the celestial hierarchy in the part of his letter dealing with the first verses of the Paradiso. In considering God as the first cause and the first mover, he uses terms like rays of essence or being flowing from one level to the next, or from one intelligence to the next. In this he is consistent with the Neoplatonic views of the scale of existence so prominent in his Convivio.

FURTHER READING Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 3 vols. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947–1948. Available online. URL: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ aquinas/summa.html. Accessed July 20, 2006. Barolini, Teodolinda. “Demythologing Dante: For a ‘New Formalism’ in Dante Studies.” Quaderni d’italianistica 10, no. 1–2 (1989): 35–53. Brugnoli, Giorgio, ed. “Epistola XIII [a Cangrande].” In La letteratura italiana: storia e testi. Vol. 5. Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1979, pt. 2:512–521; 558–643.

De monarchia Dante Alighieri. Monarchy and Three Political Letters. Introduction by Donald Nicholl. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954. Dronke, Peter. Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Hollander, Robert. Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Kelly, Henry Ansgar. Tragedy and Comedy from Dante to Pseudo-Dante. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Mazzoni, Francesco. “L’Epistola a Cangrande.” Rendiconti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche. Ser. 8, 10 (1955): 157–198. Moore, Edward. “The Genuineness of the Dedicatory Epistle to Can Grande.” Studies in Dante. 3rd series. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903, pp. 284–369. Scott, John A. Understanding Dante. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Toynbee, Paget, ed. The Letters of Dante. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.

De monarchia (Monarchy) (ca. 1309–1317?) Dante’s De monarchia is a political treatise on the necessity of a divinely ordained universal secular monarch, a concept the poet became devoted to as the result of the pontificate of his great enemy POPE BONIFACE VIII, whose persistent meddling in the temporal affairs of his native FLORENCE had resulted in Dante’s permanent exile from his home. Boniface’s thirst for worldly riches and power disgusted Dante, who embraced the ambitions of the new emperor, HENRY VII OF LUXEMBOURG, in his quest to reestablish Imperial power in Italy at the beginning of the second decade of the 14th century. Dante wrote his tract in Latin, indicating that he wanted a wide European audience for his contention that a supreme secular leader was necessary to balance the supreme spiritual authority of the pope. Dante was certainly in the midst of writing his Comedy when he composed De monarchia. He had left unfinished the other two major projects he had

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begun in exile (DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA and the CONVIVIO), but the final extant book of the Convivio is concerned in part with the ideal of universal monarchy, and perhaps Dante’s touching on that idea while writing the Convivio contributed to his decision to abandon the latter work in favor of De monarchia some time around 1308. That the two works were related somehow in Dante’s mind is further suggested by the fact that both treatises begin with an allusion to the same passage from ARISTOTLE’s Metaphysics, asserting that all human beings by nature desire the truth. But unlike the Convivio, De monarchia is a completed text, divided into three books that deal, respectively, with three questions that Dante poses in his second chapter: Is a universal monarch necessary for the good of the world? Was Rome’s achievement of that universal monarchy right and providential? And does Imperial power proceed directly from God or through his intermediary, the pope? Dante seems to have begun De monarchia, then, shortly after abandoning the Convivio and not long after beginning work on the INFERNO. It seems likely that the galvanizing event that set Dante writing his treatise was the advent of Henry VII of Luxembourg as Roman emperor. Named king of Germany (with the support of POPE CLEMENT V) in 1308 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1309, Henry announced that he would travel to Rome for his coronation (no emperor had done so since 1220). In effect this meant he intended to assert Imperial authority in Italy—a course that both the pope and the GUELPH party were determine to resist, but that Dante saw as the best hope for healing the internecine strife that plagued the country. Despite the resistance Henry crossed the Alps in 1310 with 5,000 men, was crowned in Rome in June 1312, and laid siege to the Guelph stronghold of Florence in September of that year. But Henry died of malaria in August 1313, cutting short his Imperial ambitions. According to GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO, Dante wrote De monarchia during Henry’s Italian campaign, but there is no reason to believe that Boccaccio was privy to anything more than the obvious fact that Henry sought to be the sort of monarch Dante was proposing in his text. But if De monarchia was written during Henry’s lifetime, why does

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Dante not mention him by name? He was certainly not shy about expressing his support for Henry in three political letters written during those years. Even in the Comedy Dante alludes to the emperor at least twice, in the Inferno as well as the PURGATORIO. Why should Dante be less demonstrative in De monarchia? It may be that intending his treatise to be a philosophical tract concerning universal truths, Dante deliberately chose to omit any topical references. However, he clearly alludes to Canto 19 of his PARADISO in Chapter 12 of De monarchia. Some suggest that this allusion is a scribal interpolation (i.e., an addition inserted by a scribe rather than the original author). Others think that while he probably wrote the text earlier, he revised it sometime around 1317. In any case it seems likely that Dante did not finalize the text of De monarchia until the late 1310s, years after Henry’s untimely death. Thus it is clear that Dante’s ideal did not live and die in the person of Henry of Luxembourg. He saw the monarchy as a universal need and believed that one day it must be achieved. To modern readers an ideal universal monarch, beyond the temptations of greed and power, whose only concern is for the welfare of humankind because he is motivated solely by caritas, is as unrealistic as Santa Claus. But for Dante, whose worldview was based on unquestionable universal precepts, including the notion that an omnipotent and absolutely good providence presided over human history, such a ruler was not only possible but imperative. Besides, Dante’s view is essentially an early assertion of the principle of separation of church and state, one of the tenets on which the American republic was founded— although the ideal of religious freedom that motivated America’s founders is a far cry from the dread of clerical abuse and greed that lay behind Dante’s argument. Still Dante’s faith did not save his treatise from official condemnation by church authorities. De monarchia was condemned as heretical in 1328 by Cardinal Bertrando el Poggetto and ordered burned in Bologna by POPE JOHN XXII. Still it proved relatively popular over the centuries, being translated into Italian twice before the end of the 14th century and going through two printings in the 16th.

It has not found a large audience among English speakers, but there is an excellent new translation by Prue Shaw. All citations in my text are from this edition.

BOOK 1 Synopsis Book 1 contains 16 chapters. In the first Dante begins his treatise with the statement that all men in whom God has instilled a desire for truth seek to benefit the common good and the interests of posterity. Accordingly, he says, he is writing this treatise to benefit posterity by addressing an issue that has not been dealt with sufficiently before: the issue of temporal monarchy. In Chapter 2 Dante defines the temporal monarchy as a single supreme authority over all persons in the physical world and then asks three questions concerning that authority: Is a temporal monarch necessary for the common good? Did the Romans wield that supreme authority legitimately? And does the temporal monarch derive his authority directly from God or through God’s vicar? He then goes on to indicate that his purpose is to present an argument concerning political matters based on what he calls “first principles,” not merely for the sake of philosophical understanding but in order to influence human actions on the basis of that understanding. In Chapter 3 alluding to Aristotle’s Ethics, Dante proposes to begin by determining the ultimate purpose of society as a whole, which he asserts is different from the purpose of a particular individual, family, city, or nation. This must be some faculty specific to human nature, not found in other created things. Dante identifies this as the understanding of things through the potential intellect (an Aristotelian term differentiating humans’ embodied intellect—which because of the nature of the body is sometimes inactive—from the pure and direct apprehension of angels). This potential intellect cannot be actualized completely in a single individual, but only through the collective power of the whole of human society, exercising its intellect and acting in accordance with that intellect. Since individual human beings think best in calm circumstances, Dante argues in Chapter 4,

De monarchia it follows that human society in general can best exercise its intellectual potential in times of peace. Universal peace, then, is the ideal state under which humans can fulfill their ultimate purpose, and this will be the “first principle” on which Dante will base his argument in Book 1. In Chapter 5 Dante returns to the three questions he broached in Chapter 2 and begins to address the first question. A temporal monarchy is necessary for the well-being of humanity, he asserts, and proceeds to prove his assertion with several arguments. First, citing the authority of Aristotle’s Politics, Dante declares that within a group of things directed to a common end, one member must serve as the leader to direct the others toward that end. As this is true in an individual (in whom reason acts as guide), it is also true of the family, city, kingdom, and, it follows, humanity as a whole. This leader is called “Emperor.” Dante supports this contention with two arguments based on the relationship of part to whole. A whole is the sum of its parts and is superior to any one of its parts. Since each constituent part of humanity (individuals, families, nations) requires a leader, then the whole of humanity must require one as well (Chapter 6). Similarly humankind itself is a constituent part of the cosmos, which is governed by its own sovereign monarch, God, and therefore should follow the natural pattern of the universe (Chapter 7). In Chapter 8 Dante argues that since God made human beings in his own image, humankind is happiest when it most resembles God. Since a chief characteristic of God is his unity, human beings are most in harmony with divine intentions for them when they are united, and united under a single sovereign. More philosophically Dante asserts in Chapter 9 (citing Aristotle’s Physics) that humankind is in its most ideal condition when it most resembles Heaven, which is the “father” of the race. In medieval Ptolomaic cosmology the heavens are moved by a single Prime Mover, the outermost sphere that turns all the others. A single world sovereign would most resemble this state. Now Dante moves into arguments concerning law. Citing Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he contends

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that disputes between equals must be settled justly by someone superior to both parties, and if both parties are monarchs, this can only be accomplished by a single sovereign (Chapter 10). Chapter 11 is a logically complex chapter focused on the proposition that the world is best ordered when governed by justice. Only a universal world sovereign can dispense impartial justice, since he will have the power necessary to enforce justice and a will uncorrupted by greed (since there is nothing for him to covet) and motivated by love (his concern being for all men’s welfare). Chapter 12 concerns arguments based on the idea of freedom. Freedom, the exercise of human free will, is the source of human happiness (as, Dante says, he has already asserted in his Paradiso 19, ll. 19–24). But true individual free will can exist perfectly only under a world emperor. In all other forms of government (tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule—which Dante, and Aristotle, equates with democracy) those in control are interested only in power and greed. True government is the servant of the people, ensuring that each may achieve self-fulfillment. Only the impartial emperor, motivated solely by charity, can assure this condition. In Chapter 13 Dante refutes the idea that a ruler might influence others through virtuous words but fail in virtuous actions. Only the universal monarch, freed from greed and interested only in justice, can best rule others. Dante devotes Chapter 14 to an argument based on the idea that efficiency is more acceptable to God than duplication of effort (since what is unnecessary or pointless displeases him). Since the world can be governed by a single ruler rather than more than one, it follows that it should be so governed. Dante clarifies in this chapter that the universal monarch should not be involved in the minute governing of all aspects of life, but only in larger matters applicable to all humankind. Thus, he says, the universal monarch is like the theoretical intellect, which frames the major premise or general principle in a deductive or syllogistic argument, while local rulers are like the practical intellect, which forms the minor premise of such an argument by applying the general principle to a specific case and then acts upon it.

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From here Dante moves to his final argument, based on Aristotle’s concept of unity, drawing particularly from the Metaphysics and the Ethics. He begins by relating being, unity, and goodness, asserting that “perfect being is perfect unity, and perfect unity is perfect goodness” (26). Concord, the agreement of many wills, is a kind of unity, and so a more perfect state for human society. Such concord can only occur when a single will—that of a universal monarch—guides and directs the collective wills of humankind. Book 1 ends as Dante connects all of his theoretical arguments to one historical event that, he believes, demonstrates the truth of his arguments in experience. Only once—during the reign of the universal emperor Augustus—was the whole world at peace. It was then that God chose to become incarnate in Jesus Christ, thus demonstrating his approval of that temporal condition. But the unity of that time has since been destroyed by greed, and Dante ends his first book with a direct address to the human race in general, chiding them for ignoring the lessons of universal principles, of experience, and of divine revelation. Commentary At the beginning of Book 1 Dante asks three questions: Is the universal monarchy necessary? Was the Roman Empire the true divinely ordained world monarchy? Does the emperor receive his authority directly from God or through an intermediary? Dante’s treatise will deal with each of these questions in successive books, beginning with the question of necessity in Book 1. Similarly in the last chapter of Book 1 Dante laments that humankind has not learned the lessons of the theoretical intellect, the practical intellect, or divine illumination—once again implying a threefold pattern to which his three books will conform. Thus Book 1 is concerned with the theoretical intellect, which forms arguments based upon universal principles. Indeed although Dante implies in his first chapter that he is addressing an issue that has not been dealt with sufficiently in the past, in fact his assertions that the Empire was divinely ordained and that a universal monarch was preferable to other

forms of government were not new (and were, in hindsight, perhaps even anachronistic in his own time). What was in fact original in Dante’s treatise was his reliance on precise formal Aristotelian logic to make his case. His method is uncompromisingly meticulous, deductively applying general principles to more specific cases in a series of careful syllogisms. Thus in Chapter 8, for example, Dante begins with the proposition that “every thing is in a good (indeed, ideal) state which is in harmony with the intention of the first mover, who is God” (12). This major premise is applied to the minor premise “It is God’s intention that every created thing should show forth His likeness in so far as its own nature can receive it” (12). From this the inevitable logical conclusion is that all things, including human beings, are in their ideal state when they most resemble God. Dante continues in this vein, turning the conclusion of the first syllogism into the major premise of the second: “So mankind is in a good (indeed, ideal) state when, to the extent that its nature allows, it resembles God” (13), he begins. This proposition is applied to the minor premise “mankind most closely resembles God when it is most a unity” (13), leading to the inevitable conclusion that mankind is in its ideal state when it is in a state of unity, which can only occur under a temporal world monarch. This precise deductive method may seem stilted and foreign to modern readers, partly because it is no longer possible to find acknowledged universal principles with which everyone agrees. Thus we are far more likely to argue inductively, from experience to generalizations, rather than vice versa. To the Scholastic philosophers of Dante’s day, however (such as Dante’s own beloved SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS), trained in Aristotelian logic, such a method was almost second nature. It is not surprising then that Dante’s major sources for De monarchia included Aristotle’s Politics, his Metaphysics, and especially his Ethics (in a translation by William of Moerbeke), as well as Aquinas’s commentary on the Ethics. He also used Pope John XXI’s treatise on Aristotelian logic, the Summule logicales (ca. 1250), a textbook on Aristotelian logic used in European universities for three centuries.

De monarchia Dante’s reliance on this esteemed ecclesiastical source did not save his treatise from official proscription by the church, however. It was not only that one of his chief motives in writing De monarchia was to argue that the pope should have no authority in secular matters. Dante’s text was also attacked in 1327 by the Dominican Guido Vernani, who claimed Dante was an Averroist heretic, after which POPE JOHN XXII ordered copies of De monarchia burned in the public marketplace in Bologna. Subsequently De monarchia was placed on the Vatican’s list of forbidden books until the 19th century. This charge of Averroism was based on Dante’s use of the concept of the “possible intellect” (in reference to which he cites the Muslim philosopher AVERROËS in Chapter 3 of his text). In his commentary on Aristotle’s De anima Averroës had distinguished between two aspects of the human soul: the active intellect and the passive intellect. Dante refers to these two parts in his treatise as the theoretical and the practical intellect. Averroës believed that the possible intellect died with the body—only the active intellect was immortal. But he believed that the active intellect was the same for all humankind. The logical conclusion was that Averroës denied personal immortality, and the church therefore forbade the teaching of his doctrines. Scholastic philosophers, however, such as Aquinas himself, accepted Averroës’s distinctions without accepting his conclusions. The theoretical intellect, which grasps general principles, is for Dante apparently a part of all human individuals. The possible (or practical) intellect is, for Dante, the one trait that most distinguishes human beings from God’s other creations. As intellect it puts humans above the animals. As the means through which intellect deals with the external world using the tools of a physical body, it distinguishes human beings from the angels, who in their spiritual form perceive truth directly from the mind of God. Human beings, on the other hand, must reason matters through to find truth. They must apply the universal principles as conceived by the theoretical intellect to the experiences of the physical world, a task best performed by the practical intellect in a condition of peace. For this reason, Dante argues,

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a universal monarch is necessary: to keep the peace so that human beings can better use their unique reasoning abilities. This argument, too, no doubt seems quaint to the point of naïveté to contemporary readers. The modern world, since the time of Hegel, has conceived of intellectual progress and new ideas as the result of struggle, of responding to challenges. Still many in our contemporary world do recognize the advantages that may be obtained through meditation, and so may be able to understand the predisposition of people who in significant numbers opted to spend their lives behind cloister walls, devoted to the contemplative life that many—Dante included—considered superior to the active life. One final point in Book 1 worth commenting upon is Dante’s reference in Chapter 12 to the fifth canto of his Paradiso. This allusion is important in the controversy over the date of De monarchia. Scholarly opinion has usually held that Dante must have written De monarchia between 1309 and 1311—the period during which the emperor Henry VII attempted to assert his historic Imperial rights in Italy. Dante had enthusiastically welcomed Henry’s expedition, as evidenced by three political epistles he wrote at the time. The reference to the Paradiso, however, which could not have been made much before 1318 or so, seems to belie this earlier assumption. Certainly Henry’s expedition may have provided the initial impetus for Dante’s project in De monarchia. But that enthusiasm must have cooled after Henry’s untimely death in August 1313. Of course it is always possible that the reference to the Paradiso is an addition made by a scribe—none of the manuscripts of De monarchia is contemporary with Dante—but it may be more likely that Dante was inspired to begin his text sometime during Henry’s career but completed it later, after cooler reflection, for the text of De monarchia does not read like a polemical topical tract (as Dante’s epistles on this subject do). It mentions no specific individuals, whether Imperial or ecclesiastical. Rather De monarchia is carefully and coolly reasoned, like something produced after a period of quiet, peaceful reflection—the product of that intellectual exercise Dante claims to be the highest function of the human soul.

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BOOK 2 Synopsis In Book 2 Dante addresses the second question raised in the second chapter of his opening book: Did the Roman people achieve world domination through divine right? In his first chapter (of 11) Dante declares that at one time he thought that Rome achieved its empire simply through force of superior arms. Now, he says, he has come to understand that Roman supremacy was achieved through divine providence and sets out to prove this fact in order to stop petty kings and princes from resisting Imperial power and to demonstrate to the people that they need not be subject to the yoke of these petty princes, whom he calls “usurpers.” In the second chapter Dante again reasons from “first principles,” asserting that what is right in the world, including human society, is that which happens in accordance with God’s will. In the third chapter he sets out to prove that the Romans ruled by right. It is appropriate that the noblest race should rule over others, Dante says, and the Roman people are the noblest. He proceeds to support the latter point by reference to Virgil and LIVY (TITUS LIVIUS), who trace Roman lineage to Aeneas of Troy, and continues to cite Virgil for proof of the Trojans’ noble lineage—traced to roots in all three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe). Aeneas’s nobility is also supported by the nobility of his three wives, who also embody the nobility of three continents—Creusa (daughter of King Priam) of Asia, DIDO (queen of Carthage) of Africa, and Lavinia (daughter of King Latinus) of Europe. A second argument that Rome’s world domination was God’s will is introduced in Chapter 4: Rome’s power was achieved by the aid of miracles, Dante claims, and thus (since only God can perform miracles) must be divinely ordained. Dante cites Livy and others in relating several miracles in Rome’s history: A shield fell from Heaven during a sacrifice being performed by Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius. A goose warned the Romans of an impending Gaulish attack on the Capitol. Hannibal’s army was confounded by a hailstorm, preventing his conquest of Rome. The Roman prisoner Cloelia broke her bonds and swam across the

Tiber during the siege of Porsenna. All the miracles are signs of God’s favor. In the long fifth chapter Dante offers a third argument validating Roman power. If one’s goal is the common good, then one is doing God’s will, and Dante demonstrates that Rome had the good of the community in mind in its conquests. The suppression of greed and the establishment of peace in the empire are evidence of this, Dante claims. He cites MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO to show that the Romans’ intent was protection of their allies, rather than domination. Dante follows this with a series of individual Roman examples of selfless public service. These include Cincinnatus, called from the plow to command an army, who relinquished his office and returned to the plow when his task was complete. Fabritius scorned payment for his service on behalf of the republic. Camillus accepted unjust exile rather than move against the state. BRUTUS sentenced his own sons to death for collusion with the enemy. Mutius burned his own hand after failing to assassinate the king of Etruria, frightening the king with Roman valor. The Decii gave their lives to save the community. CATO OF UTICA killed himself rather than live under a dictator. Thus on the evidence of these examples the Romans as a whole had the common good as their goal. The Roman Empire is therefore divinely ordained—and must be the only empire so ordained, because logically nature would not create two different things for the same purpose. Chapter 6 is particularly important, being the central chapter of Book 2 and, accordingly, of the entire treatise. In it Dante places human society and purpose in the context of cosmic order. Nature orders all things, and this cosmic order is good and right. For the universe as a whole to achieve its intended purpose, the order of human society must be preserved, and this must be accomplished by a people ordained by nature to rule. Citing Aristotle, Dante asserts as well that other peoples are ordained to be ruled, and since this is just, the Romans were justified in using force to bring this about. That Rome is nature’s choice for this task Dante proves by citing two passages from Virgil, in which both Jove and Anchises prophesy the coming empire.

De monarchia Now Dante begins a more elaborate argument concerning the question of human beings’ ability to discern the will of God. In Chapter 7 he enumerates several ways that God reveals his judgment in the Scriptures and in classical literature, involving either direct revelation by God (either spontaneously or in answer to prayer, directly or by sign) or through some test, either by lot or contest. Two types of contests in which Dante is most interested are a combat between champions and a race between competing athletes. These two means become the bases for his arguments over the next two chapters. Dante assumes that God determines the outcome of an athletic competition such as a race and asserts that in the much larger arena of world domination, God must necessarily have determined the winner of the race to rule the world. Rome was the winner of that race, the only civilization ever to achieve the goal. He cites the failure of the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Persians to complete the race and briefly focuses on ALEXANDER THE GREAT, who, Dante says, was struck down at the height of his power, at the very time he was negotiating the surrender of Rome—clear proof, for Dante, of God’s providential favor toward Rome. Thus their ultimate victory is the demonstration that the Romans ruled with the approval of God. In his lengthy Chapter 9 Dante uses the common medieval notion that a trial by combat reveals God’s will, as God necessarily favors the victor. It is important that such a trial be undertaken only as a last resort, and only by combatants concerned only for justice. In such cases God is present and justice will triumph. Dante says that those going to battle for justice should follow the example of Pyrrhus, the Hellenic king of Macedon in the third century B.C.E. who refused to ransom Roman prisoners since his fight was not for wealth. The victories won by the Roman people, Dante claims, were all trial by combat. He gives the example of Aeneas’s fight with Turnus at the beginning of Roman history that established the Trojan right to settle in Italy. There follows a brief history of Rome, drawn mainly from Livy (Titus Livius), LUCAN (MARCUS ANNAEUS LUCANUS), and PAULUS OROSIUS, in which Dante enumerates the Roman struggles

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against the Albans, the Sabines, and the Samnites and asserts that in all cases they were trials by combat, with God favoring the justice of Roman supremacy. The later wars against the Greeks and the Carthaginians for imperial domination Dante also frames as trial by combat and thus concludes that Roman supremacy was earned by right as God’s will. In Chapter 10 Dante moves from philosophical and historical argument to arguments based on the Christian faith. He acknowledges that many contemporary church authorities deny the authority of the Empire (and in this he refers to the contemporary Holy Roman Empire, which he sees as the direct and legitimate heir of classical Rome). These prelates, however, are the same ones who out of greed devour the substance of the church and ignore the church’s poor. He then presents his own argument. Citing the Gospel of Luke, Dante argues that Christ made the choice to be born under an edict issued by the Roman emperor Augustus. In so doing, Dante argues, Christ acknowledged the legitimate authority of the emperor. Dante continues in Chapter 11 with a second argument from Christian faith. Christ’s death on the cross was suffered as the just punishment of ADAM’s sin, in order to free all humankind from that burden and open the way to salvation. But just punishment can only take place under an authorized judge, Dante contends, and in the case of Christ this judge must have legitimate jurisdiction over all humankind, since the sin had affected all. Thus Pilate, who represented the emperor, represented a world emperor recognized by God himself. Dante ends Book 2 condemning church prelates for resisting Imperial power and lamenting the alleged Donation of CONSTANTINE THE GREAT for weakening the empire. Commentary Although Dante’s view that history moves toward a particular end that is good and right is in some ways similar to that of Hegel and even Marx, still to a contemporary reader Dante’s argument for the divinely ordained hegemony of Rome seems almost ludicrous in its naïveté and idealism. Although it is presented with the same scrupulous regard for

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the laws of syllogistic logic, the case in Book 2 requires the presentation of concrete evidence from Roman history to demonstrate the truth of Dante’s premises. Essentially Dante relies on the testimony of the Roman writers, particularly Livy, Lucan, and his beloved Virgil, in order to prove that the Romans are the world’s noblest race, Roman motives were always pure and did not involve greed or self-interest, and that God sent miracles to ensure the Roman conquest of the world. It seems never to have occurred to him that Roman authors may be biased. But in this Dante is simply a man of his time. To an early 14th-century European classical Rome was the high point of world civilization. Dante’s favorite writers—most notably Virgil—were characterized by an unquestionable personal integrity. This is clear in the fourth canto of the Inferno, where the great classical poets form a circle representing the highest human achievement possible without divine revelation. The fact that in that scene they welcome Dante among their number suggests not only that Dante thought himself worthy to be among their number (ll. 100–102), but also that he thought of those poets as like him—uncompromising in their integrity and love of truth. That Dante believed in what they said is no surprise. To a Christian audience Dante’s attitude toward Rome may also recall the scriptural viewpoint toward Israel. The Old Testament emphasizes God’s role in the history of Israel, and the New Testament views the history of Israel as a long historic preparation for the coming of Christ. The scriptural citations Dante scatters through Book 2 also suggest something about the possible biblical inspiration for Dante’s view of Roman history. Another Christian source to which Dante was deeply indebted was the Historiarum adversus Paganos libri VII (“History against the Pagans in seven books”), written by the fifth-century Spanish priest Paulus Orosius. Orosius had first emphasized the significance of Christ’s birth during the peaceful reign of Augustus, a point that Dante turns into a legitimization of Roman world domination. In this Dante is directly opposed to Orosius’s friend and contemporary SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, who contrasted the city of Rome to the City of God

in his most famous work and claimed that Christians were citizens of the latter, and only pilgrims in the former—a view that remained that of orthodox Christians for some time. Thus Dante’s second book is quite original in its view of the relationship between Christianity and the empire. As Dante sees it, that relationship was badly marred and perverted by the Donation of Constantine. Book 2 closes with an allusion to this act, when Dante says, “O glorious Ausonia [i.e., Italy], if only that man who weakened your empire had never been born, or at least had never been led astray by his own pious intentions” (62). “That man” is the emperor Constantine, who, according to medieval tradition, had ceded the entire western half of the empire to the church in gratitude for POPE SYLVESTER I’s curing him of leprosy. The Donation, of course, was a myth, and the written document purported to be Constantine’s a forgery, but that was not revealed until the 15th century. Dante believed in the Donation and deplored it, for it was that act that he blamed for first putting secular power into the hands of the pope, and thus inappropriately drawing papal attention from spiritual matters and initiating the corruption of the church. Dante makes similar comments about Constantine and the Donation in Inferno 19 and Paradiso 20. Structurally this second book is intended to be the one devoted to the practical intellect. Whereas Book 1 dealt with the question of universal monarchy in the abstract, Book 2 looks at the universal monarchy as experienced in the world. One way to look at the three-part structure of De monarchia is to see it as following the form of the syllogisms that Dante uses so effectively throughout the text. The first book, focusing on the theoretical intellect, corresponds to the major premise of a syllogism. This second book, centering as it does on the practical intellect, corresponds in turn to the minor premise of the syllogism—the premise that applies the generalization to a specific case, in this instance the historical position of the Roman Empire. Looking forward, then, the third book must correspond to the conclusion of the syllogism. The syllogism implied by the three books of De monarchia might be expressed something like this: The well-being of

De monarchia the world requires a (divinely sanctioned) supreme world ruler (Book 1). The Roman Empire is a divinely sanctioned supreme world ruler (Book 2). The conclusion therefore must be that the wellbeing of the world requires the Imperial rule of the Roman Empire. This will be the underlying assumption of the final book, though the main focus will be on whether the divine authorization of that Empire is directly from God or from some intermediary.

BOOK 3 Synopsis In his final book in 16 chapters Dante deals with what he calls the “two great lights”—the emperor and the pope—focusing in particular on the question of the source of the emperor’s authority. In Chapter 1 he expresses some concern that this last book may arouse some enmity against him but takes comfort in the words of Daniel, whom God protected in the lions’ den. Dante begins his argument in Chapter 2 by asserting the fundamental principle that “what is contrary to nature’s intention is against God’s will” (64). Before moving beyond this principle, in Chapter 3 Dante cautions that there are three kinds of people who, moved by passion rather than reason, would oppose the truth he is exploring in this book. The first group comprises the pope and other church officials, who are, he says, motivated by genuine concern for the church and not merely by pride. The second group consists of completely self-concerned churchmen who despise the idea of sovereign authority. The last group consists of the decretalists—the canon lawyers (from whose ranks Boniface had risen) who most vehemently supported the pope’s temporal power. These draw their arguments purely from decretals—decrees and laws of the church—which they believe superior to any other law or argument. Against these Dante asserts the greater authority of the Scriptures and the priority of the ecumenical councils of the church—at Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451)—at which he contends that Christ himself was present. He also affirms the greater importance of the inspired writings of the church fathers, particularly Saint Augustine. These decretals, based on church

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tradition, are authoritative because the church stands behind them. The church itself existed long before its decretals and therefore certainly does not derive its authority from them, as the church’s canon lawyers seem to believe. Neither these nor the self-interested hypocrites in the second group can be reasonably argued with, so Dante says that his argument is aimed at the first group—those whose objections to the idea of supreme authority arise purely from a genuine concern for the church’s welfare. In Chapter 4 Dante begins to refute the arguments put forward by these zealous churchmen who believe that the emperor’s authority depends upon the church. In Chapters 4 through 9 he addresses opposing arguments drawn from Scripture. He begins by noting various ways of refuting deductive arguments, as listed in Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. He then cites Saint Augustine (City of God and De doctrina christiana), who cautioned that in interpreting the scripture allegorically, one might err by seeing ALLEGORY where none was intended, or by misinterpreting the writer’s intended allegory. With these tools Dante attacks the first of the church’s scriptural arguments. In Genesis 1 God creates the “two great lights,” the sun and the moon. This was commonly taken to refer to the church and the Empire, and as the moon derived its light from the sun, so the emperor derived his power from the church. Dante argues that such an interpretation is illogical. Since neither the pope nor the emperor would have been necessary in an unfallen world, and since God created the sun and moon on the fourth day but did not create man until the sixth, the two great lights could not have been intended to prefigure something that was not yet necessary. Further even if the analogy between the lights and the two major earthly powers were intended, the sun is not the source of the moon’s light but only increases the moon’s efficiency; therefore the point seems to be that the sun augments the moon’s power, but that the moon does not depend on the sun for its existence. Dante continues his refutation of allegorical readings of scripture in Chapter 5. Here he considers the argument, based on Genesis 29.34–35, that Levi and Judah prefigure ecclesiastical and Imperial

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authority, and that because Levi’s birth was prior to Judah’s, the church has priority over the Empire in authority. Dante says he could easily deny the allegory behind the major premise of the argument but chooses instead to refute the minor premise, pointing out the obvious truth that birth and authority are not the same thing. In Chapter 6 Dante deals with a scriptural interpretation even closer to the point he is arguing. In the first book of Samuel (chapters 10, 15, and 16) Samuel places Saul on the throne of Israel and later removes him. The church would argue that this proves Samuel, as the vicar of God, had divine sanction for installing and removing temporal monarchs. Thus in the same way (they would argue) the pope (as God’s vicar) should wield such power over emperors. Dante refutes this by insisting that Samuel was not God’s vicar at all—he was rather delivering the message of God, and as messenger he had authority only for the single purpose of deposing Saul. This is not the same as a vicar, Dante insists, to whom jurisdiction is granted and who makes decisions according to his own interpretation of the laws. Dante deals with the first argument from the New Testament in Chapter 7. In Matthew 2.1–13 the magi take frankincense and gold to the Christchild, symbolizing Christ’s authority over both spiritual and temporal matters. Therefore according to the church the pope as Christ’s vicar has authority over both spiritual and temporal things. Dante accepts the symbolism of the passage but denies that Christ’s vicar is the same as Christ. As the successor of SAINT PETER, the pope does not possess the same powers as Christ any more than Peter himself did. In Chapter 8 Dante begins to consider two New Testament texts central to papal authority. Here he deals with the power of the keys bestowed on Peter in Matthew 16.19, where Christ gives Peter the keys of the kingdom and tells him that “whatsoever” he binds or loosens on earth will be bound or loosened in Heaven. The popes argued that this power included the laws of the Empire. But Dante argues that the term whatsoever must not be taken in an absolute sense—if that were the meaning, then the pope could absolve an unrepentant sin-

ner, as God himself cannot. Thus the whatsoever is limited only to the office of the keys. As for the passage in Luke 22.38, where Peter says he will have “two swords” always with him, the papal interpretation was that these swords represented temporal and spiritual power. In Chapter 9 Dante refutes this interpretation in two ways. First, he shows that it is taken out of context, arguing that it is part of a conversation at the Last Supper in which Jesus tells his disciples that they may need swords (one sword per disciple), and other things as well, from now on since he will no longer be with them. Second, Dante says, the remark is typical of Peter in its impulsiveness and unreflective simplicity and therefore should not be viewed as having a deeper meaning. Having refuted the church’s arguments from Scripture, Dante turns his attention to two historical arguments in Chapters 10 and 11. Chapter 10 deals with the Donation of Constantine, alluded to at the end of Book 1. Though he accepts as historical fact Constantine’s ceding of the Western Empire to papal control, he disputes its legitimacy. Constantine, Dante says, could not legitimately perform an act that was in conflict with his own office, and since his office was that of world monarch, he could not legitimately give away his own sovereignty. To do so would also be against human right (since human right requires a single world monarch, as he argued earlier), and it would destroy the very thing that makes the emperor what he is. Furthermore the pope could not legitimately accept such a gift, Dante argues, since doing so would be directly opposed to Christ’s instructions to the disciples in Matthew 10.9–10, where they are told to provide neither gold, silver, nor brass in their purses. The only thing that could legitimately pass between emperor and pope, according to Dante, was Constantine’s giving a patrimony over to the guardianship of the pope, who was to administer it for the benefit of the church’s poor. The second historical argument holds that since in exchange for Charlemagne’s aid against the Longobards Pope Hadrian crowned Charlemagne emperor of Rome, it follows that all emperors thereafter must be defenders of the church and crowned by the pope. In a very brief chapter Dante

De monarchia dismisses this argument, asserting that “the usurping of a right does not establish a right” (84) and pointing out that since Otto I restored Leo VIII to the papal seat after his deposition by John XII, a similar argument could be made that the pope’s authority depended on the emperor. The final argument for temporal papal sovereignty is an argument from reason, which Dante considers in some detail in Chapter 12. This is a complex argument based on the 10th book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. All members of a given species, Aristotle says, may be measured by their relationship to a single ideal member of that species. For human beings this must be a man, and according to the church, it must be the pope, since the pope cannot be measured against any other man, even the emperor. Dante refutes this position by demonstrating that the papal argument commits the “accidental fallacy”—that is, it confuses substance with accident. What Aristotle was discussing was the substantive idea of the human—what is essential in human nature. What makes a pope or emperor is authority, which in Scholastic terms is an “accident”—that is, a perceptible quality but not part of the essence of object. Put simply, one need not have authority to be a human being. Nor can pope and emperor be measured against one another (though both are in positions of authority), since their functions are completely different. They must be measured against God himself (embodiment of all authority), or against some lesser being whose distinctive feature is authority. In Chapter 13 having refuted all opposing arguments, Dante begins to mount